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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."
Um. This happened in 2002 according to the article. I think we've missed the boat on this one... the actual new information is the sentence handed down to the culprit.
++ Say to Elrond "Hello.".
Elrond says "No.". Elrond gives you some lunch.
"Judge Andrew Goymer decided against sending McElroy behind bars as he had not accessed classified material on the network and had not intended to cause harm." This is quoted from the article, but in my opinion, I dont care what your intentions are, you hack into a place like that you should be thrown in jail even if its just to show everyone else how serious you are.
The national labs have done a good job at firewalling off the non-professionaly administered machines where feasible, but the academics really don't like anything that slows down collaboration. Thus there are lots of open machines, ftp and telnet still abound and give lots of opportunities to swipe usernames/passwords in the clear even though ssh and scp are available, etc.
Most (but not all) machines running the accelerator and the detectors are on their own mostly-private subnets.
well I wouldn't be surprised if he didn't even know it was the fermi labs.
these type of guys scan just vast numbers of servers for flaws(open your apache log and you'll see a few) then open up some space on ftp and fxp some stuff to it from another(sometimes) similar ftp and then go post the thing on some list for fame(or tell it to some group of theirs). most companies never bother to raise hell over this, and most of the time it would be very difficult too as the ftp might have been used by hundreds of people all over from the globe.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
It sounds like he was just a student who had access to those machines. Does knowing the root password make you a hacker?
How about a new headline: Student abuses Lab's computers.
not always the case. the Muskegon Michigan water filtration plant has it's control computers on the network that has internet access so the paranoid supervisor can PC anywhere to spy on his employees. they have been infected several times with random viruses and trojans only because the idiot in charge of the plant wont listen to experts that that kind of stuff needs to be isolated.
one medium skilled cracker could easily cause insane damage/havoc by getting into those systems.
does the management care? nope. and if this is for a important thing like a water filtration plant, there is a very GOOD chance that their "critical" systems are just as open.
Important systems need to be disconnected completely. there is no reason to read your email or surf the net on the control Pc's.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
While we're on the topic of particle accelerators, mark your calendars for 2007 -- that's when the Large Hadron Collider will be completed in Switzerland, marking a significant step forward in particle physics.
Here's a brief description from the CERN website:
What is LHC? The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a particle accelerator which will probe deeper into matter than ever before. Due to switch on in 2007, it will ultimately collide beams of protons at an energy of 14 TeV . Beams of lead nuclei will be also accelerated, smashing together with a collision energy of 1150 TeV.
A TeV is a unit of energy used in particle physics. 1 TeV is about the energy of motion of a flying mosquito. What makes the LHC so extraordinary is that it squeezes energy into a space about a million million times smaller than a mosquito.
The LHC is the next step in a voyage of discovery which began a century ago. Back then, scientists had just discovered all kinds of mysterious rays, X-rays, cathode rays, alpha and beta rays. Where did they come from? Were they all made of the same thing, and if so what? These questions have now been answered, giving us a much greater understanding of the Universe. Along the way, the answers have changed our daily lives, giving us televisions, transistors, medical imaging devices and computers. On the threshold of the 21st century, we face new questions which the LHC is designed to address. Who can tell what new developments the answers may bring?
Nothing.
Nothing, aside from the notoriety of this trial, which may not even follow him that far - a google search on his name (Joseph McElroy) doesn't even turn up stuff referring to him in the first page. (That what he gets for sharing his name with a famous author)
The judge decided against jail time because "he had not accessed classified material on the network and had not intended to cause harm". Also, the monetary claim for damages against him was waived on the grounds that he wouldn't be able to pay it.
"not intended to cause harm"? "not intended to cause harm"? Tell me, can I bypass the metal detectors at Heathrow simply because I'm not carrying any weapons, and even if I were, intend to cause no harm with them? What if I just want to drive to the store and back, but would rather hotwire your car instead of walking?
Sure, I understand that the US has some truly brutal criminal trespass laws that are probably way out of proportion to the act they supposedly punish, and that therefore a UK judge might be more lenient in this case than a US one would, but... nothing?