Cyberattack Knocks International Meteor Organisation’s Site Offline

The International Meteor Organization (IMO), a nonprofit that coordinates and publishes amateur and professional observations of meteors, says a cyberattack has severely disrupted its ageing infrastructure. A message posted on its website on Wednesday said the incident had taken “a critical blow” to the organisation’s systems and left much of the site offline. The IMO expects several weeks of partial downtime while it moves to new infrastructure and services.

The organisation is prioritising fireball-observation reports, which can still be submitted through a separate reporting site, and is sharing some information on Facebook. The outage affects access to the IMO’s databases of meteor and fireball observations, which contain text, photographs and videos and are widely used by researchers and observers, as well as its bimonthly WGN journal. The IMO was formally founded in 1988.

No details have been given about how the attack worked, whether data was stolen or destroyed, or who was responsible. The article says there are no known claims of responsibility or ransom demands, so the incident has not been identified as ransomware. An astronomy professor described the site as a valuable resource. The report notes that attacks on space and research organisations have occurred before, but does not establish a connection between those incidents and the IMO attack.