The Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA) of Japan has made it official that its infrastructure was hit by a cyberattack that was detected on Tuesday afternoon. And highly placed sources say that the attack could have crippled the entire email network of the nuclear agency of Japan.
NRA stated that it has taken all appropriate Cybersecurity measures to curb such attacks on its IT infrastructure and insisted that no data was compromised in the recent cyber incident.
As per the Japan Times, unauthorized access was witnessed on the intranet network of the NRA in the evening hours of Monday and so the authorities decided to pull down the website from Tuesday. Authorities are suspecting a foreign nation indulgence in the attack.
However, they are not willing to make it official until the investigation gets concluded.
Note- Cyber Attacks on nuclear power plants is not new as cyber crooks are often found targeting critical infrastructure as they can steal valuable information or lock it down from access until a ransom is paid. For example, some instances are lined up below-
1.) The Indian Nuclear power plant in Kudankulam was hit by a cyber attack in July 2019. But no damage to the physical infrastructure was reported.
2.) In the year 2017, North America declared on an official note that some of its adversaries were trying to disrupt the nuclear power plants, and manufacturing units of some multinational companies through digital attacks. The US Department of Energy (DOE) confirmed that there was a cyberattack on an energy company in October 2017 and that includes the one that supplies power through nuclear energy.
3.) In the year 2015, a hacker tried to exfiltrate data and managed to disrupt a portion f network belonging to a nuclear power plant in South Korea. But the attack was tracked down on time and was curtailed before any untoward incident took place. Later it was revealed in the investigation that the disruption was caused by malware planted in the control systems and was blocked in time before it reached the reactor controls.
