investigating cyber threats in a nuclear power plant

Given information now available, one can state that if the small target a pool presents were actually hit and coolant water were drained, spent fuel bundles would melt, react with the concrete and soil below the pools, and solidify into a massin effect causing containment. They are also inviting targets for sabotage and terrorist attacks. They do reconnaissance and they try to establish a presence and maintain access. Cyber-attacks against nuclear power plants and industrial control systems are probably at the top of a long list of potential disasters that can be caused by hackers. In over two decades no meltdowns have occurred and minor mishaps at all nuclear plants have decreased sharply. He holds a B.S. With the help of portable media to reach an air gapped system with no direct or indirect connections to the internet, the attackers were able to destroy about 1,000 centrifuges at the Natanz enrichment facility. WebIn response to the cybersecurity challenges facing nuclear power plants, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has taken actions such as implementing infrastructure More accessible materials (syringes, fly ash, uranium mine tailings, smoke detectors) could be included in a conventional bomb to make a Geiger counter tick a little faster, but physical damage from an explosion would be limited to what the conventional blast could do. After the 1974 event, Ernest Graves, head of military applications for the Atomic Energy Commission (a predecessor of the Department of Energy), sent a memorandum assigning to the organizations Nevada Operations branch the responsibility for the search and identification of lost or stolen nuclear weapons and special nuclear Still, Nozomi Networks CEO Edgard Capdevielle said that kind of air-gapping can no longer be counted on to offer any real protection. Some atoms lose their energy rapidly; others remain dangerous for thousands, even millions of years. In 2014, Korea Hydro and Nuclear Power in South Korea suffered a cybersecurity incident that was blamed on their neighbors to the north. In the 1990s, the NRCs testing program revealed serious security weaknesses at nearly half of the nuclear plants tested. Radioactive fly ash, a coal byproduct used in building and paving materials, contributes an additional dose. Do they have the agility to respond to the unexpected and have they got the culture to make it better or worse?, The nuclear industry, he added, recognizes all those things as its inherent responsibilities anyway when it comes to safety.. The longer in the tooth that those get, the more an adversary is adapting.. Ethylene oxide poses a largely invisible and unrecognized threat to nearby communities. These staged intrusions have occasionally been successful, leading to further corrections. Reliability and Risk Laboratory, Department Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, The Ohio State University, Columbus, USA, You can also search for this author in While there is no evidence that the vendors have clients in the nuclear industry, experts say that attack vectorone that exploits publicly-available software updatesis a logical one in any industry. A few days after presenting at Black Hat in August 2014, Rios, the pen tester, got a call from an employee at a US nuclear facility asking him for more details on the Itemisers password backdoor. Palmer says the collaborative aspect of the work is particularly appealing to her. He is an affiliated faculty member of the Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP) and Center for Cyber Security (CCS) at NYU. With many analog components going out of stock, the onus is on nuclear operators and their suppliers to conduct rigorous tests to ensure that equipment installed at plants is bug-free. Support arms control, not nuclear weapons. But how radioactive could such a bomb be? He received his MTech and Ph.D. degrees in Software Reliability Engineering from the School of Reliability and System Engineering at Beihang University, Beijing, China, in 2006 and 2015, respectively. A growing number of devices used to control nuclear power plants, air-traffic control systems and other infrastructure can be accessed remotely, said Cuts by Congress in the NRCs annual research budget over the past 20 yearsfrom $200 million to $43 millionmay have considerably compromised ongoing reforms and effectiveness, however. It did not address the possibility of large attacking groups using multiple entry points, or of an attack involving multiple insiders; The Department of Homeland Securitywarnedin March that Russian government hackers had been targeting the nuclear industry, among others, as part of a broad two-year campaign that looks to exploit trusted third-party suppliers with less secure networks.. WebThe figure 3 shows Design Basis Threat (DBT) for cyber security (Adapted from IAEA Cyber DBT working group). A discussion on machine learning based fault detection and diagnosis (FDD) methods and cyber-attack detection methods for industrial control systems are introduced in this book as well. The idea of a cyber concept of operations, in which operators treat cyber intrusions much the way they would other hardware faults at the plant, is introduced. from the University of Toronto in 2008, and Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in 2013. More severe risks almost always lurk in everyday life: cardiovascular disease (about 2,286,000 U.S. deaths annually), smoking-related illnesses (over 400,000), and motor vehicle accidents (about 42,500). Some of these issues have been addressed in recent years, but serious shortcomings remain. I had no idea that the same devices used to detect explosives at airports were also used at nuclear facilities, Rios told me. 5 October 2015. Can we prevent them from being used again? 2 Brattle Square, Cambridge MA 02138, USA Natural background radiation: 240 millirem worldwide (300 millirem in the United States). What if terrorists gained access to a reactor? A recent Black Hat survey [PDF] of 580 cyber security professionals found that 60 percent of respondents expect to see a successful cyber attack on U.S. critical infrastructure within the next two years, and just 26 percent believe U.S. government and defense forces are equipped and trained to respond appropriately. All Rights Reserved Nuclear operators carefully isolate critical systems from public-facing networks; many systems are behind a diode that only allows data to flow in one direction, thus shielding from outside hacking. There is also concern about the testing standard used. At plants around the nation, in deep, steel-lined, heat-reducing pools of water, spent-fuel rods are accumulating in temporary storage. Most shipments consist of mildly radioactive trash like coveralls, paper cups, and sludge. This measure would supplement sheltering and evacuation, the usual protective measures. Nine states have now requested tablets. Malicious cyber-attacks are becoming increasingly prominent due to the advance of technology and attack methods over the last decade. Varonis vice president of field engineering Ken Spinner told eSecurity Planet by email that its not far-fetched to think there may be nation-state or rogue actors already resident in the networks of nuclear facilities and electrical grids. ST.. PAUL, Minn. (AP) Minnesota regulators said Thursday theyre monitoring the cleanup of a leak of 400,000 gallons of radioactive water from Xcel Energys Monticello nuclear power plant, and the company said theres no danger to the public. During his Ph.D., he was awarded the best student paper award at the 2021 Conference on Decision and Game Theory for Security (GameSec 2021) and the 2022 Dante Youla award for research excellence by the NYU ECE department. Commercial radioactive waste is generated chiefly by nuclear power plants, medical labs and hospitals, uranium mine tailings, coal-fired power plants (fissionable materials are concentrated in fly ash), and oil drilling (drill-stems accumulate radioactive minerals and bring them to the surface). WebCyber Security in Nuclear Power Plants 2 | 15 Abstract This report provides a brief overview of legacy instrumentation and control in nuclear power plants, describes the state-of-the-art and currently developing technologies, and provides some insight into past, present, and future cybersecurity issues both with nuclear power plants and with FIG. Stuxnet, which destroyed the centrifuge of an Iranian nuclear facility, is one of the most common accident cases. Rakibul Talukder: Mr. Rakibul Talukder is a graduate student in the Computer Science Department at Colorado State University. Advertise with TechnologyAdvice on eSecurity Planet and our other IT-focused platforms. Xiaoxu Diao: Dr. Xiaoxu Diao is a post-doctoral researcher working in the Reliability and Risk Laboratory in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, The Ohio State University. Its burial has been the goal of the Energy Department and the NRC for decades, but political and bureaucratic obstacles, rather than lack of scientific know-how, have slowed progress. Yeongjin Jang, assistant professor of computer science, focuses on computer systems security, especially for identifying and analyzing emerging attacks. In some cases, IAEAguidance states, nuclear plant employees specifying and purchasing instrumentation may not be aware that a suppliers product contains embedded software. And product manuals, the IAEA adds, may not clearly indicate as much. To ensure the CS protection of these infrastructures, a holistic defense-in-depth approach is suggested in order to avoid excessive granularity and lack of compatibility between different layers of protection. In response, the NRC initiated more safeguards at all plants, including improvements in equipment monitoring, redundancy (with two or more independent systems for every safety-related function), personnel training, and emergency responsiveness. A description of a testbed for nuclear power applications, followed by a discussion on the design of experiments that can be carried out on the testbed and the associated results is covered as well. series of cyberattacks aimed at U.S. and European nuclear power plants and water and electric systems from 2015 through 2017. Linan Huang: Dr. Linan Huang received his B.Eng. After the truck-bomb explosion at the World Trade Center in 1993 and the crash of a station wagon driven by a mentally ill intruder into the turbine building (not the reactor building) at Three Mile Island, plants multiplied vehicle and other barriers and stepped up detection systems, access controls, and alarm stations. Frequencies of cyber threats were estimated using two-stage Bayesian update. The commission also started a safety rating system that can affect the price of plant owners stock. After stints at Princeton University, he is currently an associate professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, New York University (NYU). In 2013 and 2014, for example, members ofDragonfly, an advanced Russian hacking group, infiltrated the websites of industrial control systems (ICS) software vendors. The Nuclear Power Corporation of India Limited (NPCIL) has now confirmed that there was a cyberattack on the Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant (KKNPP) in Could terrorists rob a weapons facility of weapons-grade plutonium or uranium? WebThis research sheds light onto about how cyber events impact plant operations. Iran's nuclear enrichment systems were hit by the Stuxnet virus that targeted centrifuges. The authors are collaborating with NPP operators to discern the impact of cyber-attacks on Could terrorists turn any of our reactors into a Chernobyl? Any cyberattack on the Nuclear Power Plant Control System is not possible. Congress designated Yucca Mountain, at the Nevada Test Sitescene of more than 1,000 atomic blastsas the first permanent U.S. repository for spent fuel. Thats what all cyber bad guys do. Special equipment and thick lead shields are required for handling, and spent fuel for transport must be placed in casks weighing about 90 tons that have been stringently tested (burned with jet fuel, dropped from great heights onto steel spikes, and otherwise assaulted) and have remained impervious. TechnologyAdvice does not include all companies or all types of products available in the marketplace. SECURITYWEEK NETWORK: Cybersecurity News The U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Investigation rank the threat of nuclear cyberattacks as urgent amber the second And the persistence of groups like Dragonfly is a reminder that attackers have time on their side and may wait years before leveraging a backdoor buried in the supply chain. Cyber Threat Characterization: Electric Power Grid. 2191-5768, Series E-ISSN: Reports indicate that foreign cyber hackers targeted nuclear plant personnel and companies that manufacture power plant control systems Washington (July 10, 2017) Senator Edward J. Markey, top Democrat on the International Cybersecurity Policy Subcommittee of the Foreign Relations Committee, today queried several top federal The Energy Departments nine national laboratories have begun an extensive review of counterterrorism, including the vulnerability of U.S. nuclear sites and materials. Web460 views, 16 likes, 2 loves, 7 comments, 4 shares, Facebook Watch Videos from Bandera News TV Philippines: PUNTO BANDERA NATIONWIDE WITH ROD SAUCELO AND HENRY SANTOS 03-18-23 Across the world, fossil fuel companies face a wave of new lawsuits for their role in the climate crisis. Publicly-reported data breaches at nuclear facilities are rare. His research interests include fault diagnosis and risk assessment for cyber physical systems. Investigating cyber threats in a nuclear power plant. Carol Smidts, The UCS post-Fukushima recommendations for the NRC included several items specifically addressing security issues. Technical Security Guidance and Evaluation for Nuclear Power Plant Cyber Networks. Modern nuclear power plants (NPPs) use a variety of digital technologies, with new technologies such as wireless sensor networks also under active consideration. Even before 9/11, UCS experts had pointed out serious flaws in NRC security regulations and their enforcement. Although those most highly exposed individuals are at an increased risk of radiation-associated effects, the great majority of the population are not likely to experience serious health consequences from radiation from the Chernobyl accident.. The NRC requires nuclear plant owners to protect such critical digital systems from cyberattack. 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