...hereditary Communist monarchy distinguished by its truculence and periodic acts of violence. Distinguishing features include Songun (Army First) policy, which involves feeding the army before anyone but the Dear Leadership, and Juche, which is Kim Jong Il's personal interpretation of Marxism-Leninism, which he told everybody was brilliant. In 1950 the industrialized North invaded agrarian South Korea. Twenty-one countries of the United Nations eventually contributed to the UN force opposing the invasion, with the United States providing around 90% of the military personnel. Seventy years later the economic results are in and it doesn't look good for Juche...'s state-sponsored hackers, the Nuclear Power Corporation of India Ltd (NPCIL) confirmed today.
News that the Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant (KNPP) might have been infected with a dangerous strain of malware first surfaced on Twitter on Monday.
Pukhraj Singh, a former security analyst for India's National Technical Research Organization (NTRO), pointed out that a recent VirusTotal upload was actually linked to a malware infection at the KNPP.
The particular malware sample included hardcoded credentials for KNPP's internal network, suggesting the malware was specifically compiled to spread and operate inside the power plant's IT network.
Several security researchers identified the malware as a version of Dtrack, a backdoor trojan developed by the Lazarus Group, North Korea's elite hacking unit.
Singh's tweet and revelation immediately went viral because just days before, the same power plant had an unexpected shutdown of one of its reactors -- with many users conflating the two unrelated incidents as one.
Initially, KNPP officials denied that they've suffered any malware infection, issuing a statement to describe the tweets as "false information," and that a cyber-attack on the power plant was "not possible."