Cyberattack on International Meteor Organization forces website offline for weeks

The International Meteor Organization, a Belgium-based nonprofit that coordinates global meteor and fireball observations, said a cyberattack has taken much of its website offline and could keep parts of it down for several weeks while it rebuilds its infrastructure.

The organization said the attack struck aging infrastructure and forced it to replace much of its site with a stripped-down holding page notifying visitors of the outage. It said it expects several weeks of partial downtime as it transitions to new infrastructure and services and will restore features as they become available. The group has continued posting updates through its Facebook page during the outage.

IMO said it prioritized restoring its fireball reporting system, which lets members of the public submit observations of unusually bright meteors, and that the system is now available again for submissions.

The organization has not disclosed when the attack occurred, how the attackers gained access, or whether any data was accessed or encrypted. It also has not said whether information belonging to users or contributors was exposed. No hacking group had claimed responsibility for the attack as of Wednesday afternoon. IMO did not respond to a request for comment, and a separate request for comment from The Register asking when the attack occurred, which systems were affected, whether data was compromised and whether a responsible party had been identified had not been answered as of publication.

Founded in 1988 to unite amateur and professional meteor observers and scientists, the IMO has helped establish global standards for meteor observation and maintains a database of meteor and fireball reports that includes photos, videos and telescopic data. The organization is scheduled to hold its annual international conference next week in France.

The attack adds to a series of cyberattacks against organizations involved in space research. U.S. agencies have previously warned of cyberattacks targeting the space industry as its economic importance grows. In 2023, hackers targeted the National Science Foundation’s National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory in Hawaii and the Atacama Large Millimeter Array observatory in Chile, and the American Meteorological Society was hit with ransomware the same year.