Chile’s ALMA radio telescope finally recovered after the devastating hacker attack

(Sergio Otarola - ALMA / ESO/NAOJ/NRAO https://bit.ly/3I5yopR)

The ground-based ALMA radio telescope system has resumed scientific observations that were stopped 48 days ago due to a major hacker attack.

The restoration of the full operation of all systems, servers and the site should be completed in the coming weeks.

ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array) is one of the world's main tools for observational astronomy.

This is an interferometer of 66 antennas located on the Chanjnantor plateau in Chile, operating in the millimeter and submillimeter wave bands.

The list of targets for radio telescope observations includes

• young stars
• nebulae
• protoplanetary disks
• exoplanets
• brown dwarfs
• solar system bodies
• galaxies
• supermassive black holes.

At the end of October, the computers of the observatory were subjected to a powerful hacker attack by unknown entities, which led to the suspension of scientific observations.

Fortunately, the attack did not lead to real damage to the interferometer elements.

However, the process of restoring the services, the site and the servers of the observatory took 48 days.

This caused tangible damage to the telescope's observational program - the last time a long downtime was caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

On December 19, ALMA resumed scientific observations, work on restoring the functionality of the observatory's computer network should be finally completed in the coming weeks.

Sources:

• ALMA: http://www.almaobservatory.org/alma-successfully-restarted-observations/
• France24: https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20221221-chile-s-alma-observatory-resumes-work-after-cyberattack

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