Hackers try to get at Large Hadron Collider
Sunday, September 21st, 2008
I suppose I should have known: it was only a matter of (a short) time before hackers would find the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) computers to be the most interesting, famous target of the month.
See the story at the Telegraph.
Last week the more geeky part of the family gathered - like a squillion other families - around the warm glow of the YouTube-pumped-over-to-the-TV. We wanted to watch the flickering lights as the first particles were accellerated into the system.
One of the childs brought up the question: is CERN’s huge battery of computers secure?
It seemed to me that whoever assembled the thing I saw in the videos would probably know how to keep it private and secure.
What did I see in the CERN videos?
It looked like a gigantic server-farm - and people talk about it being part of The Grid.
The Grid is all about very fast network connections. When people think about it they are prone to write enthusiastic articles about the entire internet or world wide web working hundreds of times faster than it does at present. Of course that is possible. But only if and when the technology is actually implemented everywhere.
So my first thought was that I had been too optimistic. I.e. I had assured the childs that whoever put that huge network tegether must know what they are doing.
But now look: a week later it has been hacked!
But my second thought was…
This is probably not even any kind of news. I read further in the Telegraph article. The hackers were the more ‘polite’ kind: they just wanted to show that the system was hackable - and maybe get some fame. Also CERN said that there were a number of layers to their security. So maybe somebody was able to get their foot in the door: that doesn’t mean they had access to the whole network.
The Telegraph article reports that CERN staff were woried and said it ‘was scary’. So what? It is very difficult for non-experts reading the news to determine whether anything interesting or important actually occurred.
Exactly how much danger was the CERN network facing? I say it is just about impossible for us to evaluate that - unless we understand networks very well, or work at CERN, or are hackers.
So was this really news? Was it newsworthy only because CERN was very famous in September 2008?
I started this blog in order to post interesting bits and pieces of news relating to comuter security. So this is the first piece of news I decided to mention - and it just makes me ask questions like “What exactly is newsworthy anyway?”
