Some hacker symbol

Oh, security@cern.ch, I know you mean well, but come on…

I’m not at CERN right now. Of all the places in the world where might I be? The safest guess would be “back a my university or lab,” but let’s not be so generic. If you had to guess one specific place I bet your safest guess would be Fermilab, home to the second highest energy accelerator in the world (but only by a hair, for now). At least in this case you’d be correct. As the LHC continues to slowly work toward interesting collisions, a scientist has got to get his science fix from somewhere. There are hundreds of scientists associated with CERN who continue to work at Fermilab, which makes the security warning email I received recently about the most absurd imaginable (emphasis mine).

From: service-security@cern.ch
Subject: [xxx] XXX: Logins from unusual location(s)

CERN computer security checks have detected login(s) using your account
at an unusual location. This might indicate that your account has been
broken into.

Please CHECK whether you have established any connection to CERN
between 2010/01/xx-xx:xx:xx and 2010/01/xx-xx:xx:xx (Geneva local time)
from the following domain(s):

dhcp.fnal.gov (131.225.xxx.xxx, United States, Fermilab)

- If NOT, please urgently contact Computer.Security@cern.ch. Your
account XXX has most probably been broken into.

- If YES, then please ignore this e-mail. You will not get another
e-mail notification for your sessions from the domains listed
above.

Thanks for your collaboration.
____________________________________________
CERN Security Team | http://cern.ch/security

OK, I’ll admit I don’t connect to one of their login computer every day, maybe not even every week when I’m not at CERN (you pull data off the grid and work locally most of the time), but I certainly do now and then. It never occurred to me I might be operating from a den of l33t haxors.