The International Meteor Organization (IMO), the Belgium-based body that maintains global standards for meteor observation and a database of meteor and fireball reports including photographs, video and telescopic data, has been taken largely offline by a cyberattack. The organisation said the attack "dealt a critical blow to aging infrastructure, taking much of our site offline", that it expects several weeks of partial downtime while it transitions to new infrastructure and services, and that it prioritised restoring the fireball reporting system, which is back accepting submissions; it has continued communicating through Facebook, and a static notice now sits on its website. No group has claimed the attack, and the organisation did not respond to requests for comment. The context is a sustained pattern against scientific and space research infrastructure: the American Meteorological Society was hit with ransomware in 2023, and in the same year attackers targeted the National Science Foundation's National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory in Hawai'i and the Atacama Large Millimeter Array in Chile. US agencies have previously warned of cyberattacks against the space industry over its growing economic importance. The timing is awkward rather than coincidental: the IMO is due to hold its annual international conference in France next week. The incident is the kind that rarely appears in threat reports because the victim is a volunteer-based scientific NGO with no ransom capacity and no regulated notification duty, but its databases underpin observations that professional and amateur astronomers worldwide depend on.

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