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:you question the actions of the scientists?

[Medievalist]

remember: everything PhDs do is art. everything. including using their alma mater's mascot name as their password. art, i tell you!

Years ago (when I still worked in science) I got a call from the US military. It seems one of our scientists was attacking one of their systems.

Since the scientist in question was on the other side of the world on a field trip at the time, it seemed likely that someone had compromised his account, and I shut it down.

When I eventually asked the scientist if was using a strong password, he was proud to recite a long dog-latin linnean binomial. It was very difficult to spell or pronounce.

Of course, that was also the first word you saw if you searched for his name on the Internet (using WAIS, since this was before commercial search engines). This particular scientist was the world's foremost authority on the organism with that difficult name, and had published dozens of papers on it.

To put it in modern geek terms, it was like this guy was Bill Gates, his userid was gates, and his password was microsoft.

The idea that criminal hackers might actually look up his name came as a total surprise to this world-famous scientist with multiple PhDs...

Misleading Telegraph

[hairykrishna]

The two key sentances of the article are:

"If they had hacked into a second computer network, they could have turned off parts of the vast detector "

"We have several levels of network, a general access network and a much tighter network for sensitive things that operate the LHC," said Gillies.

Basically they defaced a web page which is hosted on a server which is nothing to do with the LHC control network. Haven't we had enough ridiculous LHC scare stories yet?