[KennyBlanken]

If it's a state actor - the Chinese and Russians do it for practice and to sow general chaos / destruction of US infrastructure, costing money and tying up resources. Sometimes it's just to slow down other country's academics.

If it's not, it's a group doing it for practice, the lulz...and under the encouragement (or at least ambivalence) of the Russian or Chinese.

[brabel]

Do we really need to bring in russo/sinophobia into this?

As the article explains: the attackers likely don't even know it's an observatory. Hackers will attack anything they find wide open, and anyone with a public server on the internet knows, they scan the whole internet all the time looking for victims - and they mostly don't care who the victim is as long as it can pay off.