UK Government says there is no evidence of Sellafield nuclear site hacking

The Guardian newspaper in the UK has reported that Sellafield, which carries out nuclear fuel reprocessing, nuclear waste storage and decommissioning, had been hacked by cyber groups closely linked to Russia and China. The revelations have emerged in Nuclear Leaks, a year-long Guardian investigation into cyber hacking, radioactive contamination and toxic workplace culture at Sellafield.

The UK Government has today issued a statement to say that it has no records or evidence to suggest that networks at the Sellafield nuclear site were the victim of a successful cyber attack by state actors.

The full statement says :-

We have no records or evidence to suggest that Sellafield Ltd networks have been successfully attacked by state-actors in the way described by the Guardian.

Our monitoring systems are robust and we have a high degree of confidence that no such malware exists on our system.

This was confirmed to the Guardian well in advance of publication, along with rebuttals to a number of other inaccuracies in their reporting.

We have asked the Guardian to provide evidence related to this alleged attack so we can investigate. They have failed to provide this.

We take cyber security extremely seriously at Sellafield.        

All of our systems and servers have multiple layers of protection.

Critical networks that enable us to operate safely are isolated from our general IT network, meaning an attack on our IT system would not penetrate these.