Twenty countries with significant atomic stockpiles or nuclear facilities lack government regulations requiring minimal protection of those facilities from cyberattacks, according to a study by the Nuclear Threat Initiative.
The findings of the research were based on growing concerns that a cyberattack could be the easiest and most effective way for someone to take control of a nuclear power plant and sabotage it or disable the defenses used to protect nuclear material from theft.
[alert size=”alert-block” variation=”alert-success”]Some of the countries listed in the directory are Argentina, China, Egypt, Israel, Mexico and North Korea. [/alert]
The list is damning. The group examined, for example, whether cybersecurity protection is required by law at nuclear facilities and whether cyberattacks are included in assessments of potential threats to the security of these facilities. One question asked was whether there were mandatory tests to assess how secure information systems.
“20 countries failed on all indicators”, said one of the authors of the study. Due to the secrecy surrounding nuclear facilities, it was impossible to determine the cyber protection levels used to safeguard nuclear weapons in the 9 countries known to possess them.
The research also concluded that Obama's global initiative to reduce nuclear weapons, which will be the subject of his third and final summit on nuclear security in March, has been significantly delayed. This is explained by the increasing tensions with Russia.
The most famous cyberattack on a nuclear facility was carried out by the USA and Israel in an attempt to destroy and disable the nuclear centrifuges at the uranium plant in Natanz, Iran. This program, code-named “Olympic Games” used a worm later called Stuxnet to take the centrifuges offline. It did not release radiation into the atmosphere but was a live demonstration of the vulnerability of nuclear facilities to cyberattacks. Iran had completely isolated its Natanz plant from the Internet, but the program’s creators found a way to install it.
