Welcome to the scary side of technology. Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant is the largest nuclear power station, located in Tamil Nadu in southern India and is also the recent target of a mysterious cyberattack. Could this be an early warning sign for the Indian government? Read till the end to uncover what happened.
What happened?
The Nuclear Power Corporation of India earlier denied a cyber attack on the Kudankulam Nuclear Power Project, but in a turn of events, they have now confirmed that a malware was, indeed, found in one of their PCs. However, they have cleared that the infected PC was not connected to any critical systems, it is still unclear as to what this kind of threat could possibly lead to in the future.
Catching up with the back story
- Pukhraj Singh was informed by a third party about an intrusion in the Kudankulam Nuclear Plant
- Pukhraj Singh notified National Cyber Security Coordinator about the attack and shared the Indicators of Compromise with them
- He also tweeted about the cyber attack
- The story made rounds and the government was asked to give an explanation
- NPCIL denied the attack saying it wasn’t possible as the control systems are not connected to the internet
- Later, a press release was issued to confirm the attack
- The investigation said that the compromised system was a computer used for admin purposes which was not connected to the plant system
- Kaspersky researchers called this as the DTrack malware
What is DTrack?
DTrack is a trojan by Lazarus group, linked to the North Korean government. The group had earlier been linked to attacking ATMs in India and South Korean banks. It has also been held responsible for the infamous WannaCry ransomware across the globe.
What can DTrack do?
- Log keystrokes
- Steal browser history and host IP address
- Collect all running processes
- List files on disk volumes
- Collect other network-related information
- Allow remote access of the target
- Execute malicious code
What do we infer from this?
It is difficult to say if this was a close save or a warning sign for something nefarious coming our way. But one thing is for sure that someone is up to something bad. No organisation is completely safe from cyber attacks these days. Hackers constantly come up with new techniques to target systems which makes it vital for organisations, especially military, banking, defence and government to keep their cybersecurity mechanisms up to date and at par with the standards.
What are your thoughts about this? Tell us in the comments, please? Keep following this section for more updates.
Stay tuned, stay safe.
