14Sep Hackers Hit Large Hadron Collider Site

Hackers defaced one of the Web sites of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) earlier this week, but the controversial science project’s network suffered no permanent damage, a spokesman for CERN maintained Friday.

The attack took place Monday, two days before the massive collider ran its first operational test, said James Gillies, a spokesman for the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, which operates the LDC

A group going by the name “Greek Security Team,” or GST, claimed responsibility for the defacement of one of the LHC sites, csmon.cern.ch , according to a report earlier Friday in the U.K. newspaper The Telegraph.

Hackers ended the long message that temporarily replaced the CERN site with the line: “We are 2600 — dont [sic] mess with us,” said the newspaper.

It was a defacement, and that’s all it was, said Gillies today. “It was benign, but it reminds us that we need to be vigilant,” he said. “And no harm was done to the experiment or its computer network.” No additional files, malicious or otherwise, had been injected into the project’s computers, he said.