Observatories hacked!

[maw lod qan]

I just saw and read a FB popup saying that an observatory in Hawaii and Chile were hacked, so they shut them down temporarily. 

I'm sure it's a week or two behind the actual event. They are still investigating, so no releasing much information. 

Why would someone do this, other than to just see if they could?

I know it's almost impossible to catch the offender, but all this hacking needs to be punished severely, so perhaps it might deter others from doing it for fun.

[ONIKKINEN]

Time to update the IT security level of the observatory then. The attacker has to only get lucky once, but the IT security system needs to get lucky every time in order to stay secure.

Why someone would hack an observatory is beyond me though, unless it was done just because they could. I suppose it could be the typical extortion racket where the hacker hopes the victim just wants to pay to make the problem go away instead of potentially losing data which could be valuable since you cant always just go and re-take the data in a timely fashion.

[Shimrod]

2 hours ago, maw lod qan said:

 

Why would someone do this, other than to just see if they could?

 

It will most probably be a British astronomer with too much time on their hands and desperate for some clear sky.