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Cyberattack shutters major NSF-funded telescopes for more than 2 weeks
- Jason_Protell 3y agoWho benefits from attacking an astronomical observatory?
- consumer451 3y agoThat’s a good question. My initial thought was that there are threat actors who just like kicking over the sand castles of “The West.” However, this seems just a plausible: > Cybersecurity experts are perplexed as to why Gemini North was the target. “Quite possibly, the attacker doesn’t even know they are attacking an observatory,” says Von Welch, retired lead of the NSF Cybersecurity Center of Excellence.
- reilly3000 3y agoMust be aliens.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- tamimio 3y agoSomeone planning on invading the earth.
- quijoteuniv 3y agoYou should read about Proyect Lyra. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Lyra https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Lyra
- KennyBlanken 3y agoIf it's a state actor - the Chinese and Russians do it for practice and to sow general chaos / destruction of US infrastructure, costing money and tying up resources. Sometimes it's just to slow down other country's academics. If it's not, it's a group doing it for practice, the lulz...and under the encouragement (or at least ambivalence) of the Russian or Chinese.
- lionkor 3y ago[flagged]
- brabel 3y agoDo we really need to bring in russo/sinophobia into this? As the article explains: the attackers likely don't even know it's an observatory. Hackers will attack anything they find wide open, and anyone with a public server on the internet knows, they scan the whole internet all the time looking for victims - and they mostly don't care who the victim is as long as it can pay off.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- mlrpac 3y ago[flagged]
- chwahoo 3y agoRussian hacking is very real. Highly recommend https://www.amazon.com/Sandworm-Cyberwar-Kremlins-Dangerous-Hackers-ebook/dp/B07GD4MFW2 https://www.amazon.com/Sandworm-Cyberwar-Kremlins-Dangerous-...
- 65a 3y agoYou're replying to a 1 hour old account, they may not have read any of the frequent breach and ransomware related articles here.
- genter 3y agoOr, it really is Russian trolls, and they don't bother posting on July 4th because they know no one is online on that day and it's a waste of time.
- nine_k 3y agoSuppose someone sells cyberattack services. A prospective customer asked for a demo before shelling out big bucks on attacking the real target(s). They nerded something that would bring attention from media, but not a major outcry and security overhaul at the real target. A telescope fits the bill: it's not going to blow up or crash down, it has a small staff, and it's not an obscure thing that everyone would ignore in the news.
- technion 3y agoOne of the biggest difficulties I have with security is clients with the view "none would want to attack us". The problem is many ransomware gangs are opportunistic and will "target you" because you opened a word document or had an unpatched exchange server.
- throwbadubadu 3y ago> had an unpatched exchange server. "had an exchange server" - fixed that for you. I mean, after the patch is before the patch, who still runs exchange servers just deserves it, there is occurrence after occurrence that repeatedly show they are not only incapable, but then also more blame others than taking responsibility for their swiss cheese software...
- woodruffw 3y agoRansom, practice, fun, accident (confusing civilian facilities for military ones.)
- jacquesm 3y agoFun? Practice? This isn't fun, it is wanton vandalism and you can practice on your own stuff.
- woodruffw 3y agoThat wasn’t a value judgement on my part; I don’t think it’s fun. Only that “for the lulz” has been a common justification for some attackers in the past.
- kurisufag 3y ago>you can practice on your own stuff I mean, not really. If you go down that route too long you end up with something that has an attack surface so small/specific you'll never see it in the wild. There are almost always unknown variables that you can't know about or control for until you actually encounter them. Plus, popping your first live box is an ancient rite of passage.
- himinlomax 3y agoYou need to realize that to some, torturing kittens is, indeed, fun. Psychos do exist.
- Kerb_ 3y ago"for the lulz" was the tagline of many a hacker and script kiddie back in the day. Graffiti is also vandalism, and done for the lulz by toys and pros alike
- tetrep 3y agoAnyone who can benefit from: 1. Mining cryptocurrency 2. Selling access to a botnet 3. Encrypting and ransoming the computer's contents All of the above can be done to/with almost any computer on a network, so the intrinsic benefit from hacking extends to just about every computer with a network connection.
- juujian 3y ago"Why do you want to climb Mount Everest?" -- "Because it is there."
- antiviral 3y agoPerhaps there is technology for building these devices or data collected by them that someone wants. This might be a theft disguised as a mere takedown.
- ShowalkKama 3y agosome people do it for fun / just because they can
- nullc 3y agoDamn, it'll stink if they lock down these more. A fair number of professional astronomical instruments have pretty much open FTP sites / git repositories / etc. and you can go download and rifle through the stuff people are working on, control code for the instruments, etc.
- wbl 3y agoSure, but there are ways to keep that openness while having a very locked down observation submission layer
- aragilar 3y agoI presume by submission layer you mean remote control? The original noirlab press release noted that the "Mid-Scale Observatories (MSO) network" was disconnected as a precaution (which is likely some kind of site-to-site VPN), which is likely the only way to connect to the telescopes remotely (the mention of "service mode" means that people can still request observations, but they can't do them themselves without flying out to site). Service mode is becoming quite common on larger telescopes, with smaller ones heading towards automation (and being single purpose).
- eternityforest 3y agoCan't they just mirror it on GitHub, or GitLab if people don't like GitHub?
- aarong11 3y agoDoesn't have anything to do do with this does it... https://www.politico.com/news/2023/08/11/def-con-hackers-space-force-00110919 https://www.politico.com/news/2023/08/11/def-con-hackers-spa...
- raylad 3y agoWhat does someone not want observed?
- jxf 3y agoIt sounds like a number of the affected telescopes are still in operation, they're just not being remotely operated. I think it's more likely that the attackers simply don't know they're attacking a telescope. It's opportunistic, not strategic.
- rurban 3y agoAre they doing their remote control with Windows Remote Control and sharing passwords?
- seanthemon 3y agoScientists (and oft most users..) don't want friction when doing work, so they find ways around security protocols to speed up their interactions leaving little security holes everywhere.
- bawolff 3y agoWhich is why the job of a competent security team is to make the secure way be the easy way. If security protocols are a pain in the ass generally the security team has been doing a bad job. Of course a telescope might not have a security team at all.
- aragilar 3y agoI think you'd find it hard to find a Windows computer there (X and Tk are usually what's used).
- whimsicalism 3y agoI have definitely used telescopes that were running on Windows but yeah I doubt it for something like Cerro Tololo which I assume is the impacted chilean telescope
- aragilar 3y agoMe too, but they were much closer to the hobby side than the research side (it's really weird how distinct culturally the hobby and research sites of astronomy are). Cerro Tololo isn't a single telescope, it's a site with multiple ones (nearly every observatory is now), and it sounds like Gemini North (in Hawaii) was the actual one affected, but that they've basically disconnected all the different sites from each to avoid possible infection.
- cyrnel 3y ago> “A best practice would be to firewall everything off,” Welch says. “But it’s like, well, no, you just broke all the scientific workflows.” That's best-practice from the days of yore: where your security team is a group of non-technical, all-powerful dictators. Those don't still exist these days, right? Right?
- simmerup 3y agoIt is the best practice, it just happens to also be the most costly practice and not worth it for every organisation
- fulafel 3y agoThere's no "attack" wording used in the source (https://noirlab.edu/public/announcements/ann23022/ https://noirlab.edu/public/announcements/ann23022/ ).
- T-A 3y agoIn polite company it's called a "cyber incident".