Researchers and citizen observers will lose access to much of the International Meteor Organization’s online infrastructure for several weeks after a cyberattack damaged its aging systems, the nonprofit said. The group said the incident struck core elements of its platform and that restoring services will require a migration to new infrastructure and hosted services, a process it expects to take multiple weeks.
While the organisation rebuilds, it has focused on preserving key public functions. It is maintaining an avenue for reporting fireball sightings and is publishing some updates to its Facebook page. Other parts of the site remain offline, and the IMO warned that most services will be only partly available during the transition.
The IMO coordinates and publishes observations from both amateur and professional meteor watchers, and it helped establish common standards for how those observations are reported. Its databases, which collect text reports along with photos and video of meteors and fireballs, are used by many researchers and enthusiasts. The organisation also produces the bimonthly WGN journal, short for Working Group News in English, and was formally founded in 1988.
It is not clear why the organisation was targeted, or whether the attackers sought to steal data, since the IMO’s records are largely public. Sam Lawler, an associate professor of astronomy at Campion College, said, "I am very sad to see the site down." He described the resource as useful despite having no personal connection to the group.
Cyberattacks on organisations linked to space observation and research are uncommon compared with other sectors, but they are not unprecedented. Past incidents have included an accusation in 2011 involving a Romanian individual and damage to NASA systems, a breach at the National Science Foundation’s Noirlab facility, and a cyberattack on the Atacama Large Millimeter Array observatory in Chile. In 2023, US agencies warned that public and private space organisations could be targeted by nation-state actors, and the Russian government said commercial satellites might be legitimate military targets; that year Russia was also reported to be tracking communications satellites used by NATO.
Other scientific organisations have faced ransomware and extortion; the American Meteorological Society reported such an attack in 2023. Unlike that incident, there are no public reports that anyone has claimed responsibility for the IMO breach or issued ransom demands. The organisation says it will prioritise core reporting functions as it moves systems to new infrastructure over the coming weeks.
