Swastika, other hateful hacks force NOAA to shut down its weather-reporting app

A storm-spotting app intended to enlist the help of ordinary people to help track weather has instead flooded the National Weather Service with false — and even hateful — reports.

The mPING app has been shut down to be reworked, a Twitter post by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says.

Using GPS spoofs, hackers drew a swastika on the U.S. and filed bogus storm reports from Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Auschwitz and Tiananmen Square, The Washington Post reported.

Pranksters also outlined the Alabama state border with false reports of storms, wrote Tim Halbach, a National Weather Service meteorologist on Twitter.

“This is why we can’t have nice things,” Halbach wrote.

“We all know that baseball sized hail did not fall in Pennsylvania, and that a mudslide did not happen in New York City,” wrote storm chaser Matthew Schrier on Twitter. “You’re not funny.”

The app was intended to help crowd-source weather reporting by allowing “citizen-scientists” to share their observations with professional meteorologists, The Washington Post reported.

Instead, the spate of false and hateful reports has made their work harder.

“As a meteorologist who relies on accurate and timely storm reports to aid in decision-making, this makes me angry,” wrote Elizabeth Leitman with the National Weather Service, on Twitter. “And it’s happening in several states. It’s not cute or funny. Stop making work harder for others.”

The University of Oklahoma and the Cooperative Institute for Mesoscale Meteorological Studies also helped create the app, The Washington Post reported. The NOAA did not say when it would return.

This story was originally published July 14, 2020 at 4:10 PM with the headline "Swastika, other hateful hacks force NOAA to shut down its weather-reporting app."