Inpe’s website for fires is inactive after hacker attack – 08/10/2023 – Environment

The Inpe (National Institute for Space Research) website, which provides data on fires in Brazil, is offline after a hacker attack on July 20.

The public database of the Queimadas program website was accessed. The institute and the MCTI (Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation), of which Inpe is part, say, in a note sent to the reporter, that the monitoring carried out was not compromised.

Inpe also says that, although access to the public was interrupted on the site, the same did not occur with access to data made available to bodies such as Ibama, the Fire Department and the Federal Police.

July, August and September are usually critical months for fires —which, in many cases, are related to deforestation— in the country, especially in the Amazon and in the cerrado.

In a note, the ministry stated that the site was taken down for “audit and systems update”. According to the folder, public access to the page will be reestablished by the end of this week “with real-time information through the TerraBrasilis platform.”

Meanwhile, Inpe made another website available (for access to at least part of the data on fires in the country.

Inpe published a note on its website about the attack on August 1st. According to the institute, the attack would have affected only the “superficial layer of user access and the hacker had access to the same information that INPE makes available to anyone who wants to access images of interest to them”.

Days earlier, a report on the TecMundo website stated that a Russian hacker claimed to have invaded INPE’s systems.

The criminal known as Samurai (from the Russian group SecDet) commented, in a Telegram chat, on the weaknesses of government websites and gave step-by-step instructions on how to invade the website of the space research institute.

According to the TecMundo report, the situation was exposed on Twitter by the threat specialist who is known as AkaClandestine.

The hacker would also have stated that the invasion did not allow any type of control over satellites. Such information was highlighted by Inpe in the press release of August 1st.

“Additionally, we inform that there was not and there is no possibility of any external agent ‘taking control’ of Inpe’s satellites”, said, in a note, the institute. “Inpe’s satellite controls make use of a communication and processing environment that is completely independent of the Internet.”