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 …
minicomputer OS PDP-11
Any potential virus writers would first have to realise that PDP-11 isn't an OS, but a hardware architecture. I presume they're actually running some variant of RSX-11, though bits of the control system could also be running RT-11.
It would be wrong, though, to assume that these machines are standalone. There were Ethernet adapters for both Unibus and Q-Bus PDP-11s and there was manufacturer support for a wide variety of comms - DECnet, SNA, X.25 (the latter two developed in the UK) as well as (later) third-party support for TCP/IP. If there's still ongoing support, it's as likely they have the machines networked in some fashion as that they're doing updates by carrying RK05s from one machine to another.
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.
Good. Security by obscurity. I approve.
Look, I doubt that any young hacker would want to go thru the effort learn the PDP-11 hardware (it's HW, not an OS) architecture when there are easier targets running Windows.
And there are plenty of experienced PDP-11 engineers out there. Now that their kids have graduated and left the house, they would truly enjoy the opportunity to work on it again. Although I suggest Canada upgrade to VAX/VMS.
RE: Using a PDP11 for the next 20 years...
it's actually not so bad. you could (theoretically) swap in an emulator running 'simhv' or some other well-known emulator [if such an emulator exists] when the hardware breaks down. Unless there's some super-custom peripheral device involved...
it also demonstrates that reactor control computers don't have to be all that sophisticated.
/me envisions doing it with an Arduino... or RPi . And RPi could run 'simhv'
(I did some PDP-11 programming back in 'school days' including MACRO assembler so I'm kinda familiar)
I remember a conversation by email with my brother from ... oh ... at least 15 years ago now ... concerning his job writing an emulator to allow PDP-11 code to run on PCs of some sort.
And I, too, wrote PDP-11 code back in the day. In assembler, too. Uni course with the final project organised as a competition to see which of the four groups could get the best aggregate score for a sort of jigsaw-solving algorithm(1). The score was an aggregate based on memory used and time taken.
My group won the competition with the best time *and* the smallest program. Two other groups were close behind, while the fourth trailed far, far behind because they wrote a chunk of the code in Pascal, producing a result that used prodigious amounts of CPU time *and* memory.
(1) N by M puzzle, each piece was four integers to represent the four edges of the piece. A zero meant an edge piece, while a pair of zeros meant a corner. Two pieces were correctly adjacent if there was a particular arithmetic relationship between the numbers. The pieces were all aligned correctly (no rotation was needed), but arranged in no particular order.
PDP-11 is a hardware family, like "x86" or "SPARC", not an OS, so talking about a virus for a PDP-11 is meaningless. You'd also have to know which of the many PDP-11 OSes these plants are running, and in at least some cases you'd have to rebuild the OS from source to include your virus and then rewrite the boot disk.
It was not only RT-11 could support custom hardware.
I wrote many device drivers to allow custom hardware to work with RSX11-D/M/S/M-Plus when I worked at DEC.
The problem child was RSTS/E but that was a time sharing system which is not ideal in any shape or form for running real time programmes.
I had a tour of a nuclear plant a couple of years ago (the sight, sound and vibration of a "real" sized turbine in operation is something to behold) and it looked like in the control room they'd got the original 1970's systems and paper ring binders covering every possible operation, and they'd come up with an extension to the console containing a modern computer (the new part of the console was in a retro casing in imitation of the original console design)
The modern computers weren't connected to the reliable ones.
Stuxnet was the first "publicly known" successful attack on facilities installations and we still do not know how successful is actually was. How many installation have already been pwned which we are completely unaware of ?
The media is hellbent on displaying how Yahoo, Ashley Madison etc have been hacked but they truly hold no interest above and beyond personal embarrassment.
When Nuclear Facilities, Hospitals, Electrical Stations are hacked we are then in a whole new game, a very serious one... One can also only presume that the hacks are "government backed", as the information about these facilities is not public knowledge and would require insider assistance..
So the question that really needs to be asked is "What are they preparing for ?"..
Since I watched "Angels and Demons" yesterday evening I can only surmise that the "Illuminati" are not some fictive underground secret society but far more likely to be those that we ourselves put into power.
I love the ring of the word "Illuminati", it truly portrays the notion of the "Intelligencia" waving their greedy wands somewhere, and ironically, in the "shadows". I do wonder sometimes though if their ideas are not just vague remnants of spy novels that they once read and that then enticed them into making fantasy into fiction, just because they can.
See that full length body hat with "conspiracy theorist" written in dreadlocks, well that's mine.....
"Never attribute to malice that which can adequately be explained by stupidity."
I resent that. As a fully paid up member of the Bavarian Illuminati, to give it its proper name, I would just like to say that we're having one of the best years since our foundation, though Member X27b is finding the US elections a little tougher than expected and we've had to have a word with Y13a about her shoes.Oh, and don't bother trying to apply to join, we're a bit oversubscribed at the moment and it's proving quite difficult to find new world domination plots to engage in, especially as some of what is currently happening is so bizarre that we're not sure whether it is in fact us or just some random psychopath.
" Just don't worry your pretty little heads about who is really running things. "
Who? Who? If I've told you once, I've told you a million times: The Network is not a person. It is a very sophisticated computer program that successfully simulates features of natural life. But it is not "alive".
"As a fully paid up member of the Bavarian Illuminati..."
Nice try... but I have it on good authority that the world is run by The Authorised. You've all seen the signs saying 'authorised personnel only' and the like, haven't you? I think I even know where their secret headquarter is.
But seriously, book tip: Umberto Eco - Foucault's Pendulum
"But seriously, book tip: Umberto Eco - Foucault's Pendulum"
Of course - you don't really imagine I belong to the Bavarian Illuminati? I laugh at such feeble subterfuges. If you play the operating system code of an Apple II backwards at 44kHz into a low pass sound filter, you'll find it says "The world is secretly run by the Tres".
"The media is hellbent on displaying how Yahoo, Ashley Madison etc have been hacked but they truly hold no interest above and beyond personal embarrassment."
Wrong. They also hold significant interest for tabloids as a) the journalists can "understand" that, and more importantly b) they provide an excuse a reason for the right sort of pictures. In the same way that stories about school exam results seem to feature pictures of smiling teenage girls.
I suspect this is part of the same journalistic "mind" that portrays nuclear as dangerous (because it's hard for tabloids to explain when some of the tabloid journalists can't even spell science) , corporate tax arrangements as immoral (yet when the Guardian did it for years, it was fine), interception of calls/etc by governments as a terrible thing but when newspapers did it that was just a few bad apples, and so on. The word "hypocrisy" is too complicated for most tabloids to use, so why would they need to admit to it?
As for "Angels and Demons" and similar, find the QI in which Stephen Fry describes Dan Brown's "work" perfectly.
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"The Da Vinci Code may well be the only novel ever written that begins with the word renowned"
I read The Da Vinci Code. It was a wet week in Shropshire, the broadband was terrible and the mobile signal was 2 bars on the top of the nearest hill, that's how desperate I was. As literature, it was junk. The plot was probably invented by the IBM buzzphrase generator. The endless repetition of brand names grated. The probability of the events was so low that the average ink cartridge would run out before it had printed enough zeroes after the decimal point. But - and I say this carefully, aware of the likely flurry of downvotes, Stephen Fry has written at least one book that wasn't any better and should be careful what he writes on the subject. There's one about an alternative universe with no Hitler which has plot holes you could drive a galaxy-centre-size black hole through. Douglas Adams was a literary genius - a master of language and ingenuity, fizzing with ideas - and he wouldn't have knocked another author like that. Even Dan Brown.
I admit I do feel a little bad about criticising Stephen Fry - he was my generation at Fen Poly and, as he's been far more successful than me, it might seem like sour grapes. But I do fear that the epitaph on his career may be "proved that Douglas Adams wasn't replaceable."
Looking at what's happening in the world today, it makes me rather cross that DNA isn't around to comment on the insanity.
What's the collaboration between hackers infecting a nuke power plant and some kids wanting glow-in-the-dark bollocks trying to sneak some stuff out?
I don't know, but the IEA is not confirming rumours that in place of the missing uranium they found a casing full of used pinball machine parts.
Uh,yeah...unless y'all have lost your minds, this is nothing new. The West's foremost defender of all things, well westernmost is busy dealing with low quality and simple digital control systems. Whether they be locked down by access controls, or floating on the local admin system by nuts & bolts of the local control, things that go bump in the night (or Brrrr-up, on the system) are still out there.
Things are only as good as the people believe they are. Right up until the Shite hits the Phan.
It doesn't take a movie to find the problem. It only takes a sincere and dedicated asshole.
Got your temp power and flashlight handy?
I spent 2 years working with radioactive materials (H3, P32, etc) as a student in a lab (those were the days before the H&S paranoia). So my brain is in violation of the relevant part of the UK criminal code "materials useful for terrorism" (sorry, cannot remove it and hand it for police inspection).
Based on what it contains... Enriched Uranium... Dirty bomb... Meah... Wake me up when someone tries to steal any quantity of radioactive Cobalt or Cesium. Now that will be "code brown" (pants) - the sh*t is nearly impossible to clean up.
Uranium's value as dirty bomb material is purely journalistic
Thanks for that.
Interestingly I am apparently on the UK terrorism watch list for the heinous "crime" of searching for Geiger tubes, seems that an interest in radiological protection can get you put on there. Needless to say since then my mail has been tampered with and broadband hacked (twice) ended up having to go down to the Police Station and explain exactly what I was up to, voluntarily. Not that it helped, this is HMRC being awkward.
Interestingly a lot of concern has been raised about attempted thefts of "Moly Cows" in transit recently as 99Mo is about 1/8 as bad as 60Co if airborne. Fortunately these are pretty secure these days and the courier has quadruple redundant failsafes (two thoroughly vetted people turning up at the same place at the same time with 1/2 of the key, etc).. what concerns me personally is some eejit stealing an orphan source such as the Fobos-Grunt wreckage in Chile as airborne 238Pu is especially nasty.
@Conundrum1885
searching for Geiger tubes
Can't be certain, for it was a long time ago when Maplin was an electronic component retailer, they may well have had Gieger tubes in their inventory. There may have been a project published in the Maplin Magazine for a Gieger counter - Mid to late 80s?
"Can't be certain, for it was a long time ago when Maplin was an electronic component retailer, they may well have had Gieger tubes in their inventory. "
Ah, the good old days when an interest in nuclear physics led to a job with BNFL rather than being put on police watchlists. The stuff we did in the 6th form in expectation of doing a physics or chemistry degree would probably get you locked up nowadays. Having signed the OSA, it's sometimes difficult for me to remember what I am, and am not, allowed to talk about.
"Can't be certain, for it was a long time ago when Maplin was an electronic component retailer,
That was in pre-crime days my friend. Definitely in the days before the government tried to use terrorism prevention orders on people attending a Chemistry course (and that was nearly 10 years ago so way before that).
Today - you can forget it. If you show any proper interest (anything beyond reading wikipedia) you will be officially labeled subversive and enqueued for Lark Hill once Teresa Vissarionovich runs the next elections under yet another false flag to become the High Chancellor of thus unified and cleansed Britannia.
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