As if spotty teenagers releasing computer viruses on to the
internet from darkened rooms were not enough of a headache.
According to a scientific report, planet Earth's computers are
wide open to a virus attack from Little Green Men. The concern
is raised in the next issue of the journal Acta Astronautica by
Richard Carrigan, a particle physicist at the US Fermi National
Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois. He believes scientists
searching the heavens for signals from extra-terrestrial
civilisations are putting Earth's security at risk, by
distributing the jumble of signals they receive to computers all
over the world. The search for extra-terrestrial intelligence
(Seti) project, based at the University of California in
Berkeley, uses land-based telescopes to scour the universe for
electromagnetic waves. Just as stray radio and TV broadcasts are
now zooming away from Earth at the speed of light, the Seti
scientists hope to pick up stray signals, or even intentional
interplanetary broadcasts, emitted from other