Geneva (Switzerland) – It seems death threats aren’t the only thing the scientists at the Large Hadron Collider are dealing with.  According to the Telegraph UK, a group of Greek hackers managed to deface one of the LHC’s websites and also planted six suspicious looking files on project servers.

The cmsmon.cern.ch site, belonging to the Compact Muon Solenoid Experiment, was illegally accessed on September 9th and 10th and hackers bragged to the world about their feat.  A long rambling note was left on the front page, ending with “We are 2600 – dont mess with us.” (sic)  There were also several files left behind, but scientists removed them after making sure they didn’t contain any trojan horses or other remote control software.

An investigation has been launched into how hackers were able to get into CERN’s servers, but already the blame is being placed on a careless employee at the American Fermilab.

While it may sound scary that the hackers were able to penetrate the LHC servers, it should be noted that the attacked servers were only connected to the detector portion of the experiment.  As such, the most damage that could have been done is a shutdown of the sensor or – if they were really evil – possibly inject some erroneous data.

Why the servers were connected to the Internet and not separated by an “air gap” is interesting, but the scientists do have to share the data with other labs across the globe and FEDEX probably isn’t the best option.

The CMSE is just one of the detectors used in the multi-billion dollar LHC.  Just a few days ago on September 10th, the collider was turned on for the first time and scientists began streaming protons through the 27-km long chamber.  Some people feared the collider would create a miniature black hole that would swallow up the world, but CERN and other scientists have assured the world that nothing of the sort will happen.

One creative guy has a spoof CERN webcam website showing “live” footage of the collider chamber and a black hole forming.  The black hole grows to fill up the camera and finally swallows everything on the screen.  The actual CERN webcams are here.

spoof webcam

Sep 13, 2008 05:19     

now thats just unkind.. there are plenty of stupid people out there that will think thats real.. pointless fearmongering imo
aL report abuse vote down vote up Votes: -5

sic...

Sep 13, 2008 05:41     

You know what "sic" means, right? You've written "don't" rather than "dont" which means it's now grammatically correct, if not a correct quote. The sic shouldn't be there. I'm hoping that this is a simple mistake rather than the reporter being inept...
Grammar report abuse vote down vote up Votes: -9

Down with Grammar Police

Sep 15, 2008 10:58     

Leave the Black Hole Makers alone.
Hax Or report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +2