Greek Hackers Target CERN's LHC

Doomsayers Delight writes "The Telegraph reports that Greek hackers were able to gain momentary access to a CERN computer system of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) while the first particles were zipping around the particle accelerator on September 10th. 'Scientists working at CERN, the organization that runs the vast smasher, were worried about what the hackers could do because they were "one step away" from the computer control system of one of the huge detectors of the machine, a vast magnet that weighs 12,500 tons, measuring around 21 meters in length and 15 meters wide/high. If they had hacked into a second computer network, they could have turned off parts of the vast detector and, said the insider, "it is hard enough to make these things work if no one is messing with it."'"

Comments

Re:Why is that even possible?

[Anonymous Coward]

security updates?

Greek Hackers

[darth_MALL]

Any chance they had a Trojan Horse at the ready?

Well the world WOULDN'T have ended...

[KalvinB]

but some jackasses decided to mess with things they knew nothing about.

I'll get my towel.

Re:Why is that even possible?

[sakdoctor]

Vista needs to phone home for activation.

Computer security rocket science

[Yetihehe]

See? See? Computer security is harder than building 27km ring with enough precision to smash single protons!

LHC webcams

[GoNINzo]

I found an interesting video feed for the system they were accessing.

http://www.cyriak.co.uk/lhc/lhc-webcams.html

Watch it for a minute, you can see the effects the hackers are having on them.

Re:Why is that even possible?

[Bogtha]

Yeah, right, as if the LHC has enough horsepower to run Vista!