War in cyberspace... it's here now.

GOP presidential candidate John McCain may not know anything about computers, cell phones, or the internet -- but warfare in the 21st century has already made our interconnected technologies into a new and perhaps supremely important battlefield.

International -- and computer -- security experts have been paying special attention to the cyber-attacks apparently launched by Russia against some its former subjugated states from the old Soviet Union (Georgia, the Ukraine) and their information infrastructure and networks.

Now comes word from the UK's Telegraph that hackers were able come very close to shutting down the Large Hadron Collider -- the largest, most powerful atomic particle collider ever built. No lasting harm was apparently done -- but this should chill the bones of those worried about international and informational security in coming years:

[I]t has emerged that, as the first particles were circulating in the machine near Geneva, a Greek group had hacked into the facility and displayed a page with the headline "GST: Greek Security Team."

The people responsible signed off: "We are 2600 - dont mess with us. (sic)"

The website - cmsmon.cern.ch - can no longer be accessed by the public as a result of the attack.

Scientists working at Cern, the organisation that runs the vast smasher, were worried about what the hackers could do because they were "one step away" from the computer control system of one of the huge detectors of the machine, a vast magnet that weighs 12,500 tons, measuring around 21 metres in length and 15 metres wide/high.

If they had hacked into a second computer network, they could have turned off parts of the vast detector and, said the insider, "it is hard enough to make these things work if no one is messing with it."

Fortunately, only one file was damaged but one of the scientists firing off emails as the CMS team fought off the hackers said it was a "scary experience".