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News Article: LHC Website Defaced
Ehtyar:
The website of the Large Hadron Collider has had its homepage defaced by Greek hackers claiming to be 2600.
Hackers have mounted an attack on the Large Hadron Collider, raising concerns about the security of the biggest experiment in the world as it passes an important new milestone.
The scientists behind the £4.4bn atom smasher had already received threatening emails and been besieged by telephone calls from worried members of the public concerned by 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.
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Ehtyar.
Deozaan:
Paranoid, neurotic geeks? I never would have guessed it! :P
f0dder:
It's somewhat scary that they were able to break into one of the LHC-related systems. Sure, this might only have been a web frontend/whatever, and the rest of the internal network might have been much better protected, firewalled, partitioned into subnets etc... but the hackers got into one machine, and the story hints that mission-control computers would have been reachable from that machine.
When do people learn that you should never have mission-control stuff reachable from internet-facing boxes? It's pretty damn scary that some of the SCADA grids are reachable from the net.
Deozaan:
What's a SCADA grid? What could they do to the LHC that would make it dangerous or whatever?
Ehtyar:
What's a SCADA grid? What could they do to the LHC that would make it dangerous or whatever?
-Deozaan (September 14, 2008, 06:06 PM)
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I believe f0dder is referring to the LHC's Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition grid, and indeed he has a very good point. You'd think of all places that ignore security, the LHC would not be one of them.
Surely you can imagine someone managing to cause some damage with the worlds largest particle accelerator at their control.
Ehtyar.
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