The Alma telescope is ‘armored’ against cyberattacks after hacking

The Alma Observatory, the largest radio telescope in the world, located in the Atacama desert, is hardening its computer systems against cyber attacks after a group of hackers infected part of its infrastructure last October, paralyzing observations for a month and a half.

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“ANDhe attack has accelerated the implementation of projects related to cybersecurity and has increased coordination with the security offices of the organizations that are main partners of our astronomical institution”, informed the manager of Information Technology of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (Alma), Christian Saldías.

cybersecurity It has become one of the biggest challenges for organizations around the world. Last week, Italy warned that thousands of servers in dozens of countries suffered a large-scale cyber attack, which even affected the company that manages the water supply to the city of Rome.

The cyber attack on Alma occurred at dawn on October 29, at the beginning of a long weekend, with a large part of the workforce on vacation. “Very quickly, we realized that we were under a cyber attack. We started getting messages that we couldn’t use the radio telescope or access any system”, recounted the head of the Alma Science department, Elizabeth Humphreys.

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“Somewhere in the computer system -he continues-, the hackers indicated that they were attacking us and what we had to do to resolve the blockage, but, clearly, we were not going to access what they demanded: we were going to fix our systems and return to science.

Soul It is located more than 5,000 meters above sea level, on a high plateau of the Andes mountain range.where 66 large antennas scan the sky, joining their signals via a supercomputer to produce a single image between them.

Soul’s antennae they function as a single radio telescope and can be placed in 192 different locations throughout the astronomical compound, which allows the diameter of the observatory to be changed from a few tens of meters to 16 kilometers, according to scientific needs, creating among them the largest radio telescope in the world.

computer engineers isolated the systems from each other to prevent the attack from spreading, but the hackers entered the machines that are used to control the observations and paralyzed the scientific activity.

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“We are talking about 400 machines that had to be rebuilt from scratch”, admitted the computer scientist. As explained by another astronomer from Alma, Hugo Messias, at the end of January the engineers planned to complete some checks, but the computer systems have not yet recovered 100% and are suffering from the attack.

The cyberattack and its aftermath were a cold water bottle for Alma’s scientists, who had been unable to observe the sky for a year due to the pandemic and now, with the improved health situation, they thought they could do their job normally.

“At the time of the attack, I remember feeling very angry, devastated that someone had attacked an observatory like this; We are not here to get money, we are here to get scientific data.s,” Humphreys recalled.

“Seven weeks stopped -he remarked- does not sound like much, but there are hundreds of hours of data that we will never recover. It has been a difficult period.”

EFE