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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."'"
I know you are being funny, but CERN uses Scientific Linux.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
It's called "the grid". just do a google search for "LHC grid" and you'll get lots of info. Here's a couple of links for starers:
http://lcg.web.cern.ch/LCG/
http://www.gridpp.ac.uk/cernlcg.html
The BBC has a less tchnical piece on te grid: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7534866.stm
If I have nothing to hide, you have no reason to search me
You're correct (I did an internship recently on data management with the LCG/EGEE network). It's a massive multi-tiered network of datacenters (something like 50k nodes, 15PB of dedicated data storage, but don't quote me on these figures), all required to distribute the enormous amounts of data collected in the experiments to the researchers capable of processing the data.
I'm not going to be an ass and piss too much on the work of thousands of others, because it took quite a bit of effort to set this up, but them getting hacked doesn't really surprise me. The architecture they set up (even for only data-distribution) is very complex, and a lot of software they use has been written in-house or has been forked (years ago). Oh, and it's all open source, readily available for whoever looks for it. With the LHC being such a high-profile target, this is IMHO a security nightmare waiting to happen.
In what I've seen, I'm crossing my fingers that this break-in isn't related to the grid network, and that the next few months will go smoothly, but the grid has been primarily designed for high throughput, not security. Sure, they have certificates you need to access the grid systems, the policies are there, but technically I have my doubts.
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These things are internet connected in order to allow on-call technicians and facilities management to check/fix it remotely. All big machines work like this. Everyone claiming that it shouldn't be connected to the internet has never worked with a machine like this (PS: I have).
Seriously, we need to stop the hysteria over this. It's not like you're presented with a "destroy the world" button when you log in!
No, you'll land at a bash prompt. And then what? You won't know the commands necessary to get to the control system software, and, even if you did, you'd only be able to randomly tinker with magnets. This will either have no effect whatsoever, or will be prevented by the machine protection system.
The worst you can do is to interrupt operation for a while while they kick you out, and restore any changes you made (which would be easily done from automatic history software).
This is bad -- any crack like this is bad -- but it's not gonna cause black holes, it's not gonna release radioactivity, and it's not gonna break the machine.
People need to calm down.