Cases of CERN Cyber Attacks

APRIL 2019.
An Email was sent out too many members of the CERN staff, these emails had an attached
file, each one of those emails were fake, they were emails intended to tempt you to open
the attached Word document in order to have your computer infected, this a prime example
of a phishing email, which is a fraudulent email which is sent in order to persuade
individuals to reveal personal information, such as passwords and credit card numbers. This
email could’ve been an attempt at stealing documents from CERN, and then encrypting
them resulting in CERN having to pay them off, in order from them to decrypt the data, this
is known as a Ransomware/A ransom attack.
The way this is prevented, CERN Computer Security Team have a complex Spam Filtering
System which blocks emails coming from untrusted members of the organisation. This
system checks every single attachment entering the organization and tests it to see whether
it contains malware.
OCTOBER 2019
One person was dismissed from CERN for violating OC5(Operational Circular No.5) which
state, anything you would not normally do outside the privacy of your own home or
anything that violates the law or is offensive, inappropriate or immoral should not be done
at CERN. For attempting to mine Bitcoin on the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid. 2 other
people were dismissed from CERN for planting back doors in CERN computing services for
their own gain. (backdoor simply means to access a computer system or encrypted data that
bypasses the system’s security mechanisms which are put in place).
September 2007
A link to a greetings card arrived over the summer holiday period at CERN, and if you ended
up clicking this link it installed a Trojan horse program that gave the attacker control the
user’s computer. This led to several PCs at CERN being affected and then needed to be re-
installed completely from scratch.
How do CERN Prevent Cyber-Attacks?
CERN have many ways of preventing Cyber-attacks as I've said earlier, they have a Spam
filtering system. Another way CERN prevent this is CERN\s Computer Security Team engage
in direct incident response usually around 5-10 times a year, figuring out how
people/groups might have infiltrated CERN’s network, along with figuring out their motives
and their thought process behind the attack.
What does CERN Stand for?

 European Council for Nuclear Research

 CERN is based on the border between France and Switzerland
What do CERN do?

 CERN's main function is to provide the particle accelerators and other infrastructure

needed for high-energy physics research[