Nuclear Body Underplays Concerns Over Data Breach At India's Largest Reactor

The data breach at India's largest nuclear plant has nothing to do with nuclear security, a senior atomic scientist has stressed, underplaying concerns that it posed a serious risk to the plant's safety.

"These pertain to the common service balance of plant systems that have no connection with nuclear safety and security," NPCIL acting Chairman and Managing Director Rajesh V told NDTV.

The government-owned Nuclear Power Corporation of India Limited (NPCIL) is the sole body tasked with constructing and operating commercial nuclear power plants in the country.

World Leaks, a ransomware group, has posted files linked to the Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant on the dark web, Reuters had earlier reported. These included purported blueprints of parts of the nuclear plant's facilities and supplier details, it said.

Located in Tamil Nadu, Kudankulam is the largest of India's seven nuclear plants with a designated total capacity of 6,000 MW.

The report cited one of the plant's contractors as admitting that there had been a "partial breach" of its server data hosted by a third-party data centre in the country, though it did not specify what data had been breached.

Nikolas Roth, a senior director at the Nuclear Threat Initiative, said the breach could pose a "serious" risk to the plant's safety, according to the report.

The report said the leaked documents included some blueprints, supplier details, inspection records, and equipment reviews, and admitted that it could not verify their authenticity. It added that the documents do not appear to be linked to the nuclear reactor's core systems supplied by Russia's state-owned Rosatom.

World Leaks, the ransomware group behind the leak, is infamous for posting stolen corporate data on its website if the companies refuse to pay them ransom, with its website accessible only with a specialised browser.

This is the second time a cyberattack was reported at the Kudankulam plant. In 2019, the NPCIL had said that it detected malware in one of its computers. However, the plant's systems were not affected, it had stressed.