Incident: Cyber attack threatened WA astrophysicists’ shot at gravitational waves, colliding neutron stars | ABC News (Australia)
Australian Information Security Incident Reported: October 17 2017
Astrophysicists at WA’s Zadko telescope had just learned about the detection of a monumental deep space event involving two neutron stars colliding — which they had been hoping to find for years — when they came under sustained cyber attack.
They put a new schedule in the telescope, but it would not respond. They had been hacked.
Their computers were infected with viruses infiltrating their hardware, especially their central server. It meant they could not properly use the robotics system at the remote facility, 67 kilometres north of Perth.
