The NPCIL has confirmed the attack, although it does not comment on whether any data has been seized by hackers.
New Delhi: The largest operating nuclear power plant in India had suffered a cyber attack confirms reports. The reports claimed that a version of the ‘DTrack RAT’ virus had infected the plant’s administrative systems.
According to Kaspersky’s source, which named the virus, DTrack has been used in cyberattacks against financial bodies in India as a tool for aggressively extracting data from infected systems. The malware came to prominence in September this year after being blamed for an espionage attack on Indian ATMs.
The malware appears to be connected to the Lazarus group, identified by the US Department of Justice as a North Korean-backed cyber-crime organization.
After initial denial that a cyber attack was possible, the company issued another statement denying that any cyber attack on the power plant’s administrative networks could affect its control systems, as the two systems are kept separate, and that the plant’s two reactors were running with no operational or safety concerns. However, the company did not address what data could have been stolen by hackers.
Now, a third short statement has been released. This time, the NPCIL has confirmed the attack, although it does not comment on whether any data has been seized by hackers.
Some cybersecurity experts have questioned whether some critical information associated with the Kudankulam plant could have been compromised in the attack, particularly given that airgaps are in practice not completely effective at isolating sensitive systems. According to Pukhraj Singh, the respected cyber-security consultant and former National Technical Research Organisation employee who first alerted the government to the possible infection after being alerted to a suspicious data dump, the attackers had a “very privileged vantage point” in the network.
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