New Delhi: The government Thursday assured the Rajya Sabha that nuclear plants in the country are absolutely safe and steps have been taken to ensure their safety after a ‘malware infection’ was reported in the administrative network of the Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant (KKNPP).
“Let me assure the House that the nuclear plants in the country are completely safe,” Minister of State in the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) Jitendra Singh said during Question Hour in the Rajya Sabha. “We follow the mantra of safety first and production later,” Jitendra said while replying to supplementaries.
The minister added there was an identification of a malware infection on KKNPP administrative network which is used for day-to-day administrative activities. The plant control and instrumentation system is not connected to any external network such as Intranet, Internet and administrative system and thus was not affected, he noted.
“The malfunctioning was confined to administrative block and the plant per se is absolutely safe. We have now a quarterly cyber security audit from now on and have put in place an in house audit,” Jitendra informed the House.
Listing out some of the measures taken, Jitendra said these include cyber security reviews, spam and network cleaning, spam filtering, scanning mail system, data protection of services, disabling of Internet access, hardened Internet and blocking of websites from intrusions and vulnerable testing of internet.
Jitendra stated that the network in the administrative block has nothing to do with the network in the nuclear plant.
“Cyber security audit has been carried out by the Computer and Information Security Advisory Group (CISAG) of DAE along with the national agency, Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In). It concluded that the malware infection was limited to the administrative network of KKNPP,” Jitendra pointed out in his written reply.
PTI