Tag: nation state
Nuclear facility reportedly hacked by Russia and China
In what is an urgent and stark warning to nuclear facilities around the world, UK nuclear facility Sellafield, formerly called Windscale, is reported to have been hacked by groups linked to China and Russia. The 70-year-old sprawling six-square-kilometre facility, located on the North-West coast of England, holds the planet's largest store of plutonium as a result of processing nuclear waste from decades of atomic power generation and weapons programs. The UK authorities do not know exactly when the hack originally occurred, according to The Guardian newspaper, although breaches are said to have been detected as long ago as 2015, when sleeper malware, used to attack systems remotely and at will over a long period, was found to have been embedded. In what amounts to a national scandal for the UK, it is still not yet known if the malware has actually been eradicated.