By Iñaki Martínez Azpiro |
Atacama (Chile) (EFE).- The ALMA Observatory, the largest radio telescope in the world, located in the heart of the Atacama Desert, is reinforcing its computer systems against cyber attacks after a group of hackers infected part of its infrastructure last October , paralyzing the observations for a month and a half.
“The attack has accelerated the implementation of projects related to cybersecurity and has increased coordination with the security offices of the agencies that are main partners of our astronomical institution,” the Information Technology manager of the Atacama Large Millimeter told EFE. /submillimeter Array (ALMA), Christian Saldías.
Cybersecurity has become one of the biggest challenges for organizations around the world. This 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.
A morning attack
The cyber attack on ALMA occurred at dawn on October 29, at the beginning of a long weekend, with a large part of the staff on vacation.
“Very quickly, we realized that we were under cyber attack. We began to receive messages that we could not use the radio telescope or access any system,” the head of the ALMA Science Department, Elizabeth Humphreys, told EFE.
“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.
ALMA is located more than 5,000 meters above sea level, on a high plateau in the Andes, where 66 large antennas scan the sky, joining their signals through a supercomputer to produce a single image between them. .
ALMA’s antennas work as a single radio telescope and can be placed in 192 different locations throughout the astronomical complex, which allows the diameter of the observatory to be changed from a few tens of meters up to 16 kilometers, according to scientific needs, creating between them the largest radio telescope in the world.
The computer engineers, explained Saldías, 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.
“We are talking about 400 machines that had to be rebuilt from scratch,” admitted the computer scientist.
As another ALMA astronomer, Hugo Messias, explained to EFE, 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.
losses to science
The cyberattack and its consequences were a throw of cold water for the ALMA scientists, who had been unable to observe the sky for a year due to the pandemic and now, with the improved health situation, thought they could do their work 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 make money, we are here to get scientific data and discover the universe,” Humphreys recalled.
The person in charge of the scientific projects thought that the attack would be resolved quickly and that in a few days they would return to doing science: “Then we had the first estimate for the return to scientific activity, which was more than seven weeks,” said the scientist.
«Seven weeks stopped -he remarked- does not sound like much, but there are hundreds of hours of data that we will never recover; whatever small variation has occurred in the sky, be it a comet or an explosion in space, we will have lost it forever and will never get it back. It has been a difficult period, but I am proud that we have returned to science.
