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Fermi Lab Compromised by Pirate
tttonyyy writes "The US Department of Energy sounded a full scale alert after machines were compromised at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, according to this BBC article. It turns out that the hacker was a student using the machines to download and store music and movies."
Not True. I work at IT another accelerator lab in the US, and the control network is on an entirely different network firewalled off, MAC restricted, etc. Even the software engineers responsible for the control system have to be wired behind the firewall.
On a not unrelated note, we have been hacked several times by people uploading movies, MP3s, etc. The system was never rebuilt and the files were simply deleted. In general accelerator labs are not staffed for the super-anal security that you would expect (to say nothing of the number of MP3s, etc. that legitimate users have on the server)...
Here's what really happened. Users in one of the labs are all given web space on a web server. Now, the IT staff is low on manpower, with government funding behind diverted to the war in Iraq. So, security (among other things) is kind of lax.
Basically, McElroy ran Jack the Ripper on the password file. We're using an SGI 1400L from 1997. He got the root password, and removed the limits of his disk quota. Then, he stored a bunch of ripped DVD's and MP3's in his webspace.
Now you ask, why isn't the government making a big deal about this? They know their security policy is weak, and they just ramped it up. The 'alert' is really just a few days for them to get things back they way they should be. If they said "well, we won't prosecute him because if people really know what happened, it'd make us look bad", what would the American public (and rest of the world) think?!
There are thousands of computers at Fermilab, the vast majority which are desktop workstations running linux (logins are through Kerberos). Being your typical office computers sitting on a desk, they are connected to the internet via fairly high bandwidth. As we know, the WWW was invented in order for high-energy physicists to share data throughout the world, so not only does it not make sense for these machines to be cut off from the internet, it is an essential part of scientific research. Any machine that actually controls an aspect of an experiment (connected to any sort of particle accelerator or detector) is not likely to be connected to the internet.
So, yes, physicists and other scientists do depend on flawed technology, mostly because its the easiest way to be able to keep connected when you're dealing with large collaborations stretched across the world. The downside may be the occasional kid (wrongfully) taking advantage of a desktop machine attached to a T1 line. Where security is more vital, it is present. But its simply impossible to insure that everyone's desktop machine is secure or not.