India’s lone uranium enrichment facility at Rattehalli, near Mysore, may become the target of the gravest act of cyberwar against India to date, attacking no less than its strategic nuclear programme, sources in the Indian hacker/cyberwarfare community warned.
The sources said computers at the Rattehalli facility, euphemistically called Rare Materials Plant (RMP), were possibly infected by the deadly Stuxnet, or a Stuxnet-derived malware, as a precursor to an attack to destroy thousands of centrifuges installed there.
Such an attack on Iran’s Natanz enrichment plant last year destroyed over 1,000 centrifuges and set its alleged nuclear bomb programme back at least 12-18 months. The RMP is critical for India’s nuclear submarine programme. Operating close to an estimated 10,000 centrifuges, RMP produces highly enriched uranium for the 90 MW reactor that will power India’s first nuclear submarine Arihant, now undergoing sea trials, which is expected to be commissioned by 2016. Enriched uranium is also necessary for India’s boosted-fission and thermonuclear bomb programmes.
One source in the rarefied cyberwarrior community said a hostile foreign intelligence agency or rogue agents within it had infected RMP’s islanded computers — which run the plant’s operations and are not connected to the Internet or any other network.
Last week’s discovery that the new Duqu malware, a trojan derived from the Stuxnet worm, had infected computers at a private web hosting Mumbai firm lent credence and urg-ency to the warning about the Rattehalli facility.
While attempts to elicit the views of officials in the department of atomic energy failed, a government official charged with protecting critical infrastructure against cyber attacks said he did not “rule out Stuxnet-like attacks on India”. The official said he had initiated an operation to fish out all malware in critical facilities, but hadn’t designed his model specifically for Stuxnet.