London, September 27 : The security of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s biggest scientific experiment, is in danger, with hackers mounting an attack on the systems of the mega machine.
The LHC is the world’s largest and the most powerful particle accelerator, located near the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva, Switzerland.
According to a report in the Telegraph, as the first particles were circulating in the machine near Geneva where the world wide web was created, a Greek group hacked into the facility, posting a warning about weaknesses in its infrastructure.
Calling themselves the Greek Security Team, the interlopers mocked the IT used on the project, describing the technicians responsible for security as “a bunch of school kids.”
However, despite an ominous warning “don’t mess with us,” the hackers said that they had no intention of disrupting the work of the atom smasher.
“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 in Greek in a rambling note posted on the LHC’s network.
The official website of the LHC - www. cmsmon. cern. ch - can no longer be accessed by the public as a result of the attack.
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 12500 tons, measuring around 21 metres in length and 15 metres wide/high.
According to an insider, “If they had hacked into a second computer network, they could have turned off parts of the vast detector.”
Fortunately, only one file was damaged, but one of the scientists firing off emails as the CMS team fought off the hackers said that it was a “scary experience”.
The hackers targeted the Compact Muon Solenoid Experiment, or CMS, one of the four “eyes” of the facility that will be analyzing the fallout of the Big Bang.
The CMS team of around 2000 scientists is racing with another team that runs the Atlas detector, also at Cern, to find the Higgs particle, one that is responsible for mass.
“There seems to be no harm done. From what they can tell, it was someone making the point that CMS was hackable,” said James Gillies, spokesman for Cern. “It was quickly detected,” he added.
“We have several levels of network, a general access network and a much tighter network for sensitive things that operate the LHC,” said Gillies. (ANI)
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