well said thelmores! 
the LHC does have a practical use after all!

to those that want to slate this group of people who hacked in...

if, when leaving your house in the morning, someone points out to you that you have left your front door or a window wide open, would you not be gratefull that you now know about, and can fix, the problem?
that passer by could have come back later and burgled your house
this is a digital version of the same thing, be thankfull there was no damaged caused because these were decent people. 
taking it one stage further, the person in charge of security at the collider should be reprimanded and some thanks given to the people who raised this loophole to the attention of the staff at the LHC

Crysis with all the settings max'd.

Or use it as a faster HD version of youtube.

Every time I hear of yet another bunch of punks hacking into something I just want to shoot somebody (preferably them). If they're so bored that they have to go mess with Billion dollar projects to get their jollies off they need to go hack into a Swiss bank account and go buy themselves a life (or at least put their skills to good, preferably legal use). 

Instead of screwing with people, they should be helping them, like hacking into Bush's computers and finding the truth behind Iraq or something helpful like that. Only it will have come several years too late but at least we'll put that crook behind bars for manufacturing a war.

Wonder what it would be like if you really did break INTO the LHC? I imagine those beams of protons zipping through your body thousands of times a second would provide a cheap thrill.

There should be no criminal offense. If anything is criminal it is the fact that there were billions of dollars spent developing and implementing this collider and that its computer systems could be compromised. Yes the LHC is not a toy, which is why those hackers are trying to prove a point. You don't let a multi billion dollar piece of equipment go unsecured and unprotected. If someone really wanted to cause some harm, it would be a great loss to the scientific community.

Why do all of your articles about LHC have to include religious nonsense?

Funny that the infantile schoolkids who pulled this stunt would be using the term schoolkids as derogatory.

And surely Hawking has noticed the effect but he was unable to pull his own pants down, thus leaving him exasperated and frantically puffing on his tube.

Now one might think that CERN might at least have been smart enough to keep their web server safely off in a DMZ, making this a mere tempest in a teapot. Or at least we can hope...

We'll, it's kind of a toy but for grown-ups! ;)

We need a black hole to put all the dumbass politicians around the globe, as well as all the sheepish population that support them!

Suck up a few loser hackers as well!

I'm surprised why no criminal offense was filed against these guys. THE LHC is not a toy.