Weeks after a cybersecurity incident was discovered by researchers at the US National Science Foundation (NSF), many telescopes remain offline.
The Gemini North Telescope in Hawaii, the Gemini South Telescope in Chile, and a number of small telescopes on Chile’s Cerro Tololo Mountain were closed.due diligenceAs of now, no announcement has been made as to when the plant will resume operations.
On the morning of August 1, IT staff at NSF’s NOIRLab detected suspicious activity within its computer systems, leading to the decision to suspend operations at the giant 8.1-metre-diameter optical-infrared telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, to ensure its safety. I put it down.
The telescope’s southern “twin” in the Chilean Andes was already ready for maintenance and required little.
It’s not clear what danger the telescope itself faced, but the threat is a reminder of the fact that science is an expensive business, and astronomical research facilities require annual budgets. . easily reach millions.
Every day that researchers are unable to access facilities is a loss to the scientific community. There are problems not only in terms of finances but also in terms of data loss.
Astronomical research often requires precisely timed operations, so such interruptions can ruin an entire research project if a sufficiently important observation window is missed.
While this was one of the first ransomware breaches of a scientific research facility, hacks of astronomical facilities are not unheard of.
For example, in October 2022, a hacker accessed the Atacama Large Millimeter Array Observatory in Chile via a VPN and shutdown for several months The facility cost approximately US$250,000 per day.
The suspected ransomware attack is believed to have been aimed at extorting money from a consortium of observatory operators.
a few years before thatunauthorized raspberry pi Systems connected to computers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory provided unauthorized access to deep space networks, prompting Johnson Space Center to completely disconnect its own mission systems from the Gateway.
As the scientific infrastructure for studying space grows in size and complexity, and as the scale of projects expands and attacks become more sophisticated, more funding is required to protect the information technology at its core. .
There has been no official word on the cause of the recent NOIRLab incident.
“The attacker probably doesn’t even know they’re attacking an observatory,” said von Welch, former director of the NSF Cybersecurity Center of Excellence. Serena Chao and Tanvi Dutta-Gupta of Science Magazine said: