Foreign hackers breached a US nuclear weapons plant via SharePoint flaws

Airgapping Nuclear and Critical Systems

• Many argue nuclear and “nuclear-adjacent” facilities should be legally barred from internet connectivity.
• Others push back: dams, grids, levees, etc. can be just as dangerous, and facilities still need email, procurement, HR, and vendor access.
• Common real-world pattern: strictly separated “business” and “operational” networks, with one‑way data diodes or tightly controlled links from OT → IT.
• Several commenters emphasize that “airgapped” usually means “no casual browsing,” not “physically impossible to exfiltrate,” and that managers, regulators, and vendors still demand real‑time data.
• Stuxnet is cited as proof that airgaps greatly raise the bar but do not guarantee safety; defense in depth remains essential.

How Big a Deal Was This Breach?

• The plant in question makes non‑nuclear components; production systems are described in the article as “likely” airgapped or isolated.
• Some see the story as over‑sensationalized “nuclear plant hacked” clickbait affecting mainly corporate IT, not weapons control systems.
• Others highlight the post‑disclosure exploit timing: patches were available weeks earlier, so failure to patch a nuclear‑weapons supplier looks like serious operational incompetence, especially if design docs or supply‑chain information were accessible.

Microsoft, SharePoint, and Secure Alternatives

• Strong hostility toward SharePoint: described as bug‑ridden, UX‑hostile, and integration‑fragile (e.g., corrupting CAD metadata, breaking rsync checksums, Office web bugs in Firefox, confusing Copilot‑centric navigation).
• Several note that the core failure here may be exposing SharePoint directly to the public internet (often with weak passwords), not merely its existence as a complex web app.
• Defenders argue that Exchange/SharePoint are virtually the only widely available, scalable, integrated stack that can serve tens of thousands of users with mail, calendaring, and document collaboration plus backward compatibility with old workflows.
• Critics respond that this “only viable at scale” narrative is unproven, that large Postfix/Dovecot and other OSS deployments exist, and that governments could fund hardened open‑source stacks instead of depending on a monoculture.

Tooling Choices as Cultural Signal

• Some engineers use MX records and Microsoft-heavy stacks as a proxy for rejecting employers, associating them with poor engineering culture, broken tools (Teams/SharePoint/Outlook), and “good enough” attitudes.
• Others dismiss this as elitist: most of the world runs on Microsoft, and many non‑MS stacks are just as messy; what matters more is management culture and network segmentation than brand.

Inevitability and Weird Failure Modes

• Several note that nation‑state intrusions into high‑value targets are effectively inevitable; reducing exposed surface, patching quickly, and layering controls is the realistic goal.
• Anecdotes (e.g., an alerting loop created by logging Excel traffic) illustrate how unexpected feedback paths can create security and reliability problems, reinforcing the need for audits, red‑teaming, and careful architecture.