Greek Security Team Hacks CERN-LHC

2008-09-18

CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research is one of the world's largest and most respected centers for scientific research. At CERN, the world's largest and most complex scientific instruments are used to study the basic constituents of matter - the fundamental particles. The Large Hadron Collider, LHC, is a gigantic scientific instrument near Geneva, where it spans the border between Switzerland and France about 100 m underground and is the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator.

Last week, a Greek hacking group that goes by the name 'Greek Security Team' defaced one of CERN's LHC web servers with a 'statement' in the Greek language. While some news reporters speculated the worst - George Chlapoutakis, a GrayHat Network Security researcher and Digital Forensics researcher quickly posted a blog post about the highly publicized incident and translated the Greek text line-by-line to expose the reason behind the hack.

Here is some of the translated text:

"At this time an experiment attempt is being performed in CERN. The reason we chose this page is to remind you of some things. It [the deface] did not happen due to a conflict between us and CERN's system administration team but because of the expected increase in number of visitors in the page in the next few days.

The ** have simply been placed so that we don't expose people who has done nothing to anger us. As we stated in the preamble, we do not want to destroy either the [operating] system or the website.. Our purpose is to show, through action, our reaction to a lot of "active" members of the GHS [Greek Hacking Scene] which has become arrogant without offering anything...

Stupid cliques get created simply to insult and cause trouble through either words or IRC channel banning people who are not considered, by them or their flunkies, worthy of their knowledge and their image.

Some others, the 1337 (leet, elite) of the "scene", only chat over cups of coffee and don't do anything practical, as they are good at gossiping..but of "security"...what is that? we are 2600..don't mess with us."

At the end of the page, the 'Greek Security Team' states:

"Dear CERN admins we patched the biggest BUG in your webpage so it doesn't turn into a Dork and gets defaced every day with the silliness of every wannabe hacker.

Don't try to find us...We will find you...pretty soon!!!

Tnx Mr Server [lxplus.cern.ch]

_Greek Security Team_ - [.GST]

George Chlapoutakis goes on to explain, "They just wanted to impress the Greek underground scene with a 'high profile' hack. For the love of whichever deity you wish to name, they wrote the whole thing in the Greek language! Their ONLY target audience was, therefore the Greek skiddies (script kiddies)."

You can read Georges entire blog post, along with the entire hack translation, here