Are Outer Space Aliens Hacking Your PC?
Just when you thought your firewall would save you - now you gotta worry about the first wave of War of The Worlds coming in the form of a buffer overrun! At least Richard Carrigan, a particle physicist at the US Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois, seems to think so.
He speculates that SETI (the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence project), which uses people’s personal PCs to help decode blocks of electromagnetic waves (signals) from outerspace in the hopes of discovering alien life, could cause widespread damage to computers via damaging alien space signals. He suggests that Seti scientists build safety features into their network to prevent potentially damaging signals before they infect the internet.
As someone that uses SETI on his PC, I’m thinking that evil aliens might set a more diabolical course against humanity than trying to crash a group of mufon nerd’s PC’s… but as my mom always says “don’t bet against a particle physicist when it comes to electromagnetic waves from outerspace”. And mom knows best!
