News24 wrote:
Atom smasher computers hacked
13/09/2008 13:28 - (SA)
London - Hackers claim they have broken into the computer system of the Large Hadron Collider, the mega-machine designed to expose secrets of the cosmos, British newspapers reported on Saturday.
A group calling itself the Greek Security Team left a rogue webpage mocking the technicians responsible for computer security at the giant atom smasher as "schoolkids", the Times and Daily Telegraph reported.
The hackers vowed they had no intention of disrupting the experiment at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (Cern) on the Swiss-French border, they just wanted to highlight the flaws in the computer system's security.
"We're pulling your pants down because we don't want to see you running around naked looking to hide yourselves when the panic comes," they wrote, according to the Daily Telegraph.
The hackers claimed to have gained access to a website open to other scientists on Wednesday as the LHC passed its first test with flying colours, the reports said.
They appear to have tried to gain access to the computer system of the Compact Muon Solenoid Experiment, one of the four detectors that will be analysing the progress of the experiment.
James Gillies, a spokesperson for Cern, told the Times: "We don't know who they were but there seems to be no harm done. It appears to be people who want to make a point that Cern was hackable."
Scientists hailed the success of the start of the experiment on Wednesday in the Large Hadron Collider, the 27-kilometre circular tunnel in which parallel beams of protons will be accelerated to nearly the speed of light.
Superconducting magnets will then steer the counter-rotating beams so that strings of protons smash together in four huge laboratories, fleetingly replicating the conditions that prevailed at the "Big Bang" that created the Universe 13.7 billion years ago.
Hacking for pride is not new Prime or Freakazo. People do it all the time. I've done a bit.
People hack for different reasons. This was a hack with less impact then most other attacks.
Just be glad these people did it for 'fun' rather then malicious intent.
Imagine the 27Km tunnel with the power turned up 500 000%. That would suck.
These hackers could have done that and non would have seen it coming.
Soon Google will know everything...including how to divide by zero
Frozenfireside wrote:Hacking for pride is not new Prime or Freakazo. People do it all the time. I've done a bit.
People hack for different reasons. This was a hack with less impact then most other attacks.
Just be glad these people did it for 'fun' rather then malicious intent.
Imagine the 27Km tunnel with the power turned up 500 000%. That would suck.
These hackers could have done that and non would have seen it coming.
Even so, if the engineers who designed the LHC had half a braincell, there would be physical countermeasures to prevent overloading. In all likelyhood, the controlling mainframe isn't even networked anyway.
I doubt they had access to control of the machines. Probably only data that the machines generated, stuff that would be shared with scientists. If they had write access to the data it would be a problem.
Stupid hacker script kiddies. It's easy to hack. With enough people doing so, it gets easier. Seeding torrents or sharing on P2P networks called CrysisKeyGen.exe or SheMale3dPr0n.exe are the downfall of retarded people. Botnets are born and peoples brand new PCs run slower, LHC's database gets accessed by Greeks. This.. is.. SPARTA!!!
Frozenfireside wrote:Meh I'm pretty sure they could have gotten into the controls. Maybe they said 'we got this far so let's tell them and go out for beer and a pizza'.
That's what I would do.
So, you're pretty sure that the most expensive scientific experiment would make the controls for the multi billion $ particle accelerator available on a network???
Agreed with Kronos. From the stuff I've developed they keep all the control on a tight intranet (or single PC / supercomputer / micorocontroller) with no link to the internet at all. In industry, the only remote control they ever want is shutdown. I don't even think they would build that into the LHC.
This is from personal experience with Platinum furnace electrode control and ANFO (mining explosive) silo remote pumps (silos are connected directly via GSM, RS232 comms, no networking, all the supervisor can do is watch what the controllers are doing remotely and abort their pumping and phone the controllers and crap on them because they taking chances or do troubleshooting and diagnostics if need be). If someone where to hack into the system and guess the passwords, all they'd be able to do is shut down the pumps. Nothing dangerous. They are getting their own APN and 3G / GPRS upgrades now.
That was assuming someone would want to hack their system... 
