The organization has not disclosed when the attack occurred, how attackers gained access or whether any information was accessed, stolen or encrypted. The incident has forced IMO to rebuild portions of its infrastructure rather than simply restore its website.
IMO has also not said whether information belonging to its members, meteor observers or other contributors was exposed.
An expert with Black Hills Information Security offers perspective on the matter.
Bronwen Aker, Report Editor, Black Hills Information Security:
“An organization that tracks space debris burning up in the atmosphere for free doesn’t seem like a juicy target for malicious hackers, so an attack against the International Meteor Organization makes little obvious sense from a financial perspective. It doesn’t make much more sense if the goal was to harvest credentials for identity theft or other forms of fraud, either."
“Without more information, there is no way to know exactly what happened. And if IMO’s infrastructure was as old and fragile as the organization suggests, they may never know. Older systems are not known for comprehensive logging, and logging is one of the things incident responders depend on to reconstruct an attack: how someone got in, what they touched, what they changed, and whether they took anything with them."
“That matters because IMO has not said how the attackers gained access or whether information was accessed, stolen, or encrypted. The absence of an answer does not necessarily mean the organization is withholding one. It may simply mean the evidence needed to answer those questions was never recorded."
“The bigger question for me is: why pick on a bunch of science geeks?"
“Organizations like IMO operate on limited budgets and a great deal of volunteer effort to collect scientific observations and make that information useful to everyone. Maybe the attackers were simply scanning the Internet for vulnerable systems and happened to find one. Maybe IMO was deliberately targeted. We do not know."
“But from the outside, it has the feel of a bully knocking over the nerd simply because he can. Whatever the motive, the result is weeks of recovery work for an organization whose primary mission is watching the sky and sharing what it learns.”
