Just When You Thought It Was Safe To Smash Atoms…

Apparently even conducting what is arguably the biggest experiment in the world is not bereft of security threats. The London Telegraph reports that hackers mounted an attack on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), got past its defence in depth strategy, and successfully hijacked Cern's website at smsmon.cern.ch, put up a page title "Greek Security Team" and referenced the hacking organization 2600. Half a dozen foreign files were also uploaded to the giant, nearly $8bn atom-smasher's computers. WOW.

This all began Wednesday afternoon, as the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment to detect the Higgs particle; which is responsible for mass, began and follows a barrage of threatening emails and telephone calls by the public concerned with what the Telegraph reports as "speculation that the machine could trigger a black hole to swallow the earth, or earthquakes and tsunamis, despite endless reassurances to the contrary from the likes of Prof Stephen Hawking."

Apparently according to Cern scientists, the hackers were "one step away" from the computer control system of a critical component of the machine, and they could have disabled some of its functions. As it happened, one file was damaged during the attack, but this and the foreign file upload were remediated. A spokesman for Cern commented that there seemed to be no harm done, and speculated that the hackers were trying to make the point that the system was hackable.

I just know someone is furiously banging out a movie script somewhere...

Read the Telegraph's article here.

Erick Simpson

MSP University

www.mspu.us