Nuke plant has been hacked, says Atomic Energy Agency director

The director of the International Atomic Energy Agency has said he's aware of a successful hack of a nuclear power plant. And as if that isn't bad enough, he also knows of an attempt to steal enriched uranium.

Yukiya Amano is the agency's director and on Monday visited Germany for meetings, where a Reuters correspondent heard him say an attack on a power plant three or four years ago “caused some problems” and saw the facility “take some precautionary measures.”

The plant did not need to shut down.

The wire service also reports Amano as saying he is aware of an attempt to “smuggle a small amount of highly enriched uranium about four years ago that could have been used to build a so-called 'dirty bomb'.”

Amano's remarks are prima facie terrifying, but perhaps even scarier when one considers our 2013 story revealing Canada's nuclear plants will run code specificallly assembled for PDP-11 minicomputers for at least another 30 years. Try finding antivirus software for that! Or security auditors who truly understand its innards. ®