This Throwback Thursday, we turn the clock back to 1993, when VB asked the key question: could a virus compromise safety at one of Britain’s nuclear power plants?
2010 saw the discovery of Stuxnet, which targeted industrial control systems in general, with the specific target of a particular Iranian nuclear facility — but 2010 wasn’t the first time
VB
had reported on a virus infection at a nuclear facility.
In 1993, one of the UK’s nuclear power plants, Sizewell B, fell victim to the Yankee virus. As is so often the way with these things, the media went into overdrive — the combination of perceived danger to the public, nuclear power and computer viruses did, after all, give the story all the required elements to be highly newsworthy, and much of the portrayal bordered on the hysterical.
In December 1993,
VB
decided it was important to cut through the hype and ask the key question: could a virus compromise saftey at the plant? Then-editor of
VB
Richard Ford paid a visit to the plant and concluded that not only did
Nuclear Electric
, the company running Britain’s nuclear power plants, take the threat of viruses seriously, but that the Yankee virus had clearly never threatened the integrity of the Sizewell B computer systems in any way whatsoever.
The report can be read
here
in HTML-format, or downloaded
here
as a PDF (no registration or subscription required).
Posted on 23 July 2015 by
Helen Martin
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