Greek hackers have targeted the Large Hadron Collider
Hackers breach Cern security
/v3-uk/news/2001749/hackers-breach-cern-security
12 Sep 2008, Iain Thomson , V3
A Greek hacking crew has come close to getting into the controls of Cern's Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which went live on Wednesday.
The hackers managed to breach Cern's network defences and got into the Compact Muon Solenoid Experiment. There they left a file reading: 'GST: Greek Security Team. We are 2600 - don't mess with us.'
"There seems to be no harm done. From what they can tell, it was someone making the point that it was hackable," James Gillies, a spokesman for Cern, told The Daily Telegraph.
"It was quickly detected. We have several levels of network, a general access network and a much tighter network for sensitive things that operate the LHC."
The hackers were described as "one step away" from the computer control system of one of the huge detectors of the LHC, a vast magnet that weighs 12,500 tons, measuring about 21 metres in length and 15 metres wide.
"We think that someone from Fermilab's Tevatron [the competing atom smasher in America] had their access details compromised," said one of the scientists working on the machine.
"What happened wasn't a big deal. It just goes to show that people are out there always on the prowl."
Cern said that the centre had been deluged with calls and emails from members of the public, worried that the LHC would destroy the planet by creating a black hole, despite such claims being checked and rejected.
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Do you agree?
Idiots Connected to the Internet
Now it is confirmed.... the CERN team are idiots, take away their keys and send them home!
The World's BIGGEST experiment that is "unlikely" to destroy the planet Earth has it's controlling computers linked to the internet, now why am I feeling so reassured?
Posted by David, 13 Sep 2008
Just a little remembering for all
The WWW was invented at CERN. CERN is the largest scientific collaboration in the world, so CERN is directly collaborating with the most prominent universities, which includes the Stanford University, Harvard, Princeton, the MIT and many of Europe. CERN could easily manage to use the highest level of computer science knowledege today; they could actually invent again the WWW, and the computer security they require. I believe (I'm not sure), that all this kind of news are totally unobjective, the security problems just reached the web servers of CERN, which by using a very well known solution like php/mysql are vulnerable. The most mythical figures in computer sciences are in the direct collaboration with CERN. Certainly the fact of having 20 years of working of the most prominent minds of the world makes not sense with this kind of news. They could reinvent computers if they wanted.
Luis G. Navarro
Physics Department
University of Veracruz
Mexico
Posted by Luis Navarro, 31 Oct 2008
WWW vs. Internet Confusion
Luis Navarro in an earlier comment confused the World Wide Web with the Internet. It's true that the WWW was created by Sir Tim Berners-Lee with collaboration with Robert Cailliau while they both worked at CERN, but the WWW is the concept and of using hypertext links to link a very large collection of knowledge.
The reference should be to the Internet or perhaps to TCP/IP, neither of which CERN, as great as they are, invented. Both of these were created by the US DARPA.
There's a big difference.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet
Posted by Jeff, 30 Nov 2009