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

Why is that even possible?

[Reality Master 201]

Why can anyone get to the control systems for a piece of equipment like that from the internet?

Air gap and 15 Petabytes of data annually

[fejes]

Ok, I know you want to think that this can be done... but how exactly do you air gap a system that produces 15 Petabytes of data annually and share that data with 100's of labs around the world?

By manual entry, copying this data across the air gap (120wpm) would take:

15,000,000,000,000,000 characters /(120 words/minute * 6 characters/word) = 4*10^7 years.

Even passing that back and forth on hard drives means shutting about (15Pb/365/24 = ) 1.7 Terabytes per hour. (24 hours a day.)

At some point, you have to admit that just connecting this thing to the internet and securing it is the right thing to do.