UK's Telegraph reports hackers at CERN's LHC

William Atkins
Friday, 12 September 2008 20:43

Science - Energy

The U.K. newspaper Telegraph reports online that Greek hackers were able to gain momentary access to a CERN computer system of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) while the first particles were zipping around the particle accelerator on September 10, 2008.


The Telegraph article “Hackers attack Large Hadron Collider,” by Roger Highfield, reports, “... as the first particles were circulating in the machine near Geneva, a Greek group had hacked into the facility and displayed a page with the headline ‘GST: Greek Security Team.’”

The LHC scientists have already received numerous death threats, threatening emails, and other harassing messages from concerned people around the world, even though scientists continue to reassure people that there is no danger from the world’s largest particle accelerator and collider.

Recently, another article, one of very many, has been written to reassure the public of the safety of the LHC. Written by Brian Greene, it appears in The New York Times under the OP-ED (opinion-editorial) title “The Origins of the Universe: A Crash Course.”

Dr. Greene is a respected theoretical physicist and professor of mathematics and physics at Columbia University in New York City. He is a well-known string theorists, having written such popular science books as “The Elegant Universe” and “The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality.”

Greene also has narrated the PBS television special “The Elegant Universe.”

The Telegraph article stated that the hackers were “one step away” from the “control system of one of the huge detectors of the machine.”

Page two describes the control system and comments from a CERN spokesperson as to what problems occurred because of the computer hackers.