Computer viruses have been one of the main threats for the computer world and this time they have infected some of the PCs that are used at a German nuclear power plant. This happened at Gundremmingen which is about 120km (75m) northwest of Munich and this plant is Gemany’s highest output power nuclear station.
The viruses were found on many office computers and even in a system that was used to model the movement of the nuclear fuel rods. However even after this major attack to their Software and IT side the Power firm RWE said that this infection posed no threat to the plant as its control systems were not linked to the internet. So due to the lack of internet the viruses could not activate and hence will definitely not pose any threat.
Even though it is not going to pose as a threat, the German federal cyber investigators are now analyzing as to how the Gundremmingen plant could have infected. These viruses were found on the fuel rod modelling system and on 18 USB sticks that were used as removable data stores on most of the office computers. These threats were found by the staff, as they prepared to upgrade the computerised control systems for the plant’s Block B. The Block B was not producing anypower and was under scheduled maintainance at that time.
Currently after this incident, even if there has been no problem for the plant , more than 1,000 computers have now been checked for infection and cleaned up and the plant has also improved its security controls.
About the Viruses:
Among the viruses that infected the nuclear plant were two well-known malicious programs – W32.Ramnit and Conficker. While Ramnit debuted in 2010, it is a remote access tool that its creators use to steal data. Conficker is something more deadlier and it dates from 2008 and aims to grab login names and financial data.
However in this place of event as the infected systems were isolated from the internet they were unable to activate, update or steal any data.