Monday, September 15, 2008

Hackers deface LHC site, came close to turning off particle detector



The message in Greek that the hackers displayed.
Is it now cyberwar over atom-smashing? A team of Greek hackers calling themselvses Greek Security Team has penetrated the Large Hadron Collider and defaced a public website. No real damage done, but the hackers got perilously close. The hackers attacked the Compact Muon Solenoid Experiment, or CMS. The Guardian reports:

Scientists working at Cern, the organisation 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 metres in length and 15 metres wide/high. ...  - zdnet

... The hacking attempt started around the time that the giant machine was about to circulate its first particles, under the spotlight of the world's media.


On Wednesday afternoon, as the world held its breath as the machine sparked up, CMS team members were scouring computers at the machine for half a dozen files uploaded by the hackers on September 9 and 10.


"We think that someone from Fermilab's Tevatron (the competing atom smasher in America) had their access details compromised," said one of the scientists working on the machine. "What happened wasn't a big deal, just goes to show people are out there always on the prowl."


The CMS team studied the files inserted by the hackers carefully before deleting, in case a "backdoor" had been installed, a means of access to the computer that bypasses security.


The system the hackers managed to access was CMSMON, which monitors the CMS software system as the vast detector takes data, during collisions between particles to study the energies and physics in the immediate aftermath of the Big Bang, which created the universe. - telegraph



Can anyone translate this? Just curious.

2 comments:

GodKillzYou said...

It's really disgusting that there are people out there who are so anti-science that they are willing to compromise a project like this.

I mean, even if you thought the project was a "waste of money," wouldn't it be 10x worse to compromise the project, rendering all of that money spent even more of a waste... by not allowing that equipment to accomplish anything whatsoever?

The people who did this are completely ignorant.

Edge said...

first and formost this money and effort could be put to better use to help humanity.
the image lacks some words of the text..it just says they are defacing it while the experiment takes place..bunch of noobs! script kiddies.