Polish authorities announced Thursday they are investigating whether Iranian hackers are behind the attempted attack on a major nuclear research facility.
The cyberattack unsuccessfully targeted the National Centre for Nuclear Research, which houses the country’s only operating nuclear reactor, officials said. Polish digital minister Krzysztof Gawkowski said that “the first identifications of the entry vectors … are related to Iran,” while cautioning that the signals could be deliberate misdirection to hide the criminals’ true location.
“There was an attempt to break through the security that was stopped,” he told private broadcaster TVN24+. “When there is final information and the services will check it, we will verify it, but there are many indications that it took place on the territory of Iran.”
The nuclear center released a statement saying that “the MARIA nuclear reactor is safe” and the “integrity of the systems was not compromised.”
“An expanded analysis” of the incident is ongoing, Gawkowski posted on X. “At present, we do not identify any threats” to the center’s operations, he continued.
The development in Świerk followed Iranian hackers who appeared to successfully carry out a cyberattack against a major U.S. medical technology company on Wednesday. Thousands of employees were affected. Stryker confirmed the cyberattack caused a global disruption to its Microsoft systems. The hackers displayed the logo of an Iran-linked group on the company’s internal login pages, Western cyber threat experts told the Wall Street Journal.
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The U.S. has long been at odds with Tehran, due largely to the country’s nuclear weapons program. But tensions erupted with the joint U.S.-Israeli strikes against Iran on Feb. 28, sparking a volley of retaliatory Iranian attacks against primarily Middle Eastern countries, including NATO members such as Turkey. NATO forces in Turkey intercepted two Iranian missile attacks in separate incidents earlier this month, swiftly neutralizing the threat.
Poland, the victim of one of Iran’s latest attempted attacks, is also a NATO member and houses thousands of U.S. troops.
