2023-06-27 13:00:31
At the end of last year, the Chilean Alma Observatory had to stop all observations for 48 days due to a cyber attack. Image: Enno Kapitza/Focus
Scientific institutions are easy victims of cybercrime. It’s about ransom, data and computing power. The institutes are trying to defend themselves against the criminals with new means.
On October 29, 2022, at 6:14 a.m., one of the most important observatories with which humanity peers into the depths of the universe suddenly went blind. The more mundane reason for this: Cyber criminals wanted to extort some ransom. They had chosen the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, or Alma for short, on a five kilometer high plateau in the Chilean Andes as the target of their attack. This observatory can peer through dark veils of cosmic dust to observe the birthplaces of distant stars and planets, and glimpse galaxies from the universe’s infancy. It is a component of the global conglomeration of telescopes that first imaged the immediate vicinity of a black hole in 2019. On this Saturday morning, however, nothing worked.
Sean Dougherty remembers the day well. The Canadian astrophysicist is the current director of Alma. A text message reached him around eight in the morning. “That’s when I found out that we were being attacked,” he says. Hackers had encrypted electronic access systems. The astronomers could neither make observations nor electronically control the 66 mobile, up to twelve meter wide parabolic antennas that make up the observatory. “It was a sophisticated attack, they knew exactly how to take control of our systems from us,” says Dougherty.
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