USGS earthquake alerts hacked?

The USGS ENS just issued news about an magnitde 6.9 earthquake in the border region between Russia and Ukraine. Geologically, this does not make any sense at all and almost the only realistic source of so much seismic energy in this region would be a Megaton nuclear explosion. This obviously did not happen.

Rather it looks as if some cyber warrior gained control over the ENS system. The report has some errors (the coordinates are too round, the number of phases is zero, the uncertainty is zero) which make it seem as if somebody without too much seismological knowledge fed this into the database to be automatically send around.

The USGS currently does not list an event pt 15044001, so maybe the hack just affected the notification system.

Apparently, this "event" did not make it into the news, so maybe only a subset of recipients was affected (or only full nerds subscribed the ENS), but in the current situation there might be some players that would benefit from such rumours, no matter how shortlived.

Crazy times.

Apparently somebody else noticed:

Here is the full text of the message:

-------- Ursprüngliche Nachricht --------
Von: ens@ens.usgs.gov
Gesendet: 13. Februar 2015 20:14:20 MEZ
An:
Betreff: 2015-02-13 18:59:36 (M6.8) RUSSIA-UKRAINE BORDER REGION 52.8 32.0 (49202)