Nuclear plants in India are absolutely safe and steps have been taken to ensure their safety after a "malware infection" was reported in the administrative network of one plant in Tamil Nadu, the government told parliament on Thursday.
"Let me assure the House that the nuclear plants in the country are completely safe," Minister of State in the Prime Minister's Office Jitendra Singh said during the Question Hour in the Rajya Sabha.
"We follow the mantra of safety first and production later," he said while replying to supplementary questions.
Singh said there was an identification of a malware infection on Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant (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 the administrative system and thus was not affected, he said.
"The malfunctioning was confined to administrative block and the plant per se is absolutely safe," he said.
"We have now a quarterly cyber security audit from now on and have put in place an in-house audit," the minister said.He said after the malware detection a committee of experts was set up comprising Directors of Indian Institutes of Technology and experts, who have made certain recommendations and the same are being implemented.
Listing out some of the measures taken, he 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. Ends
