{"id":15623,"date":"2019-06-25T20:47:11","date_gmt":"2019-06-26T04:47:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/2019\/06\/25\/news-9372\/"},"modified":"2019-06-25T20:47:11","modified_gmt":"2019-06-26T04:47:11","slug":"news-9372","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/2019\/06\/25\/news-9372\/","title":{"rendered":"Chernobyl\u2019s lessons for critical-infrastructure cybersecurity"},"content":{"rendered":"

Credit to Author: Seth Rosenblatt| Date: Fri, 21 Jun 2019 15:30:00 +0000<\/strong><\/p>\n

This story originally ran on <\/em>The Parallax<\/em><\/a> on April 26, 2019.<\/em><\/p>\n

CHERNOBYL EXCLUSION ZONE, Ukraine\u2014The stray dog looking directly at me was hard to resist. Her ears perked up, her fur appeared clean\u2014free of mange, at any rate\u2014and she held a large stick firmly between her jaws.<\/p>\n

She looked like a good dog. She wanted to be petted or, at least, have someone wrestle the stick from her\u2014perhaps throw it so she could retrieve it. But because we met near Cafe Desyatka, in the woods of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, a 1,004-square-mile region slightly smaller than Yosemite National Park that surrounds the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, looking but not touching was probably the safer choice. I was less worried about how irradiated she might be than about whether she had rabies.<\/p>\n

According to a 2017 estimate by the United States\u2013based nonprofit Clean Futures Fund<\/a>, this dog was one of hundreds of strays living in the Exclusion Zone, near the power plant, and in the abandoned cities of Chernobyl and Pripyat, which once housed the nuclear facility\u2019s employees. The organization offers aid to communities decimated by industrial accidents, and that includes\u00a0caring for the Chernobyl dogs<\/a>, many of whom die young due to malnourishment, disease, predators, harsh weather, a lack of shelter, and Chernobyl\u2019s notorious environmental contamination.<\/p>\n