Anna Isaac and Alex Lawson report:
The UK’s most hazardous nuclear site, Sellafield, has been hacked into by cyber groups closely linked to Russia and China, the Guardian can reveal.
The astonishing disclosure and its potential effects have been consistently covered up by senior staff at the vast nuclear waste and decommissioning site, the investigation has found.
The Guardian has discovered that the authorities do not know exactly when the IT systems were first compromised. But sources said breaches were first detected as far back as 2015, when experts realised sleeper malware – software that can lurk and be used to spy or attack systems – had been embedded in Sellafield’s computer networks.
Read more at The Guardian.
Update of December 5: FirstPost reports:
Hours after The Guardian report claimed that UK’s most hazardous nuclear site Sellafield has been hacked into by cyber groups closely linked to Russia and China, Britain on Monday said that it has no records or evidence to suggest that networks were compromised.
“Our monitoring systems are robust and we have a high degree of confidence that no such malware exists on our system,” Reuters quoted the government as saying.
“This was confirmed to the Guardian well in advance of publication, along with rebuttals to a number of other inaccuracies in their reporting,” the government added.
Read more at FIrstPost.