A leading daily newspaper in Japan is running an article right now that it’s been discovered that hackers stole plans for nuclear power plant design and safety plans, as well as fighter jet plans, from Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd. Computers. Sources told The Ashai Shimbun that during the period of time that the Japanese defense contractor’s computers were infected with Trojans last August hackers made away with these sensitive documents.

In August, over 80 computers at one of the control facilities had been discovered to be infected with viruses. Many of these infections were identified as Trojans—malware designed to take over computer systems and often “phone home” used often to transmit information out.

Although at the time of the infection company spokesmen had no comment if any compromise had happened, sources now believe that evidence has surfaced that information was stolen.

According to sources, a further investigation into dozens of computers at other locations found evidence that information about defense equipment and nuclear power plants had been transmitted from those computers to outside the company.

The defense information is related to the fighter jets and helicopters that Mitsubushi Heavy manufactures for the Defense Ministry. Officials said they were uncertain if any confidential defense information was included in the leaked data.

Sources said the nuclear plant information included data on nuclear plant design and nuclear equipment, as well as anti-quake measures.

Defense contractors happen to be extremely bright targets on the dartboard for corporate and state espionage, especially now in the age of cyberwarfare. In the past we’ve seen many US companies suffer attacks and attempts to penetrate their defenses such as Lockheed Martin, Nothop Grumman, and L-3 Communications. Those attacks are suspected to have been perpetrated by a well-funded, highly sophisticated crew allegedly backed by a nation state that first breached RSA Security in order to gain access to cryptographic access information.

Very recently a virus infected the US air-force unmanned drone command—and that was discovered to be a Trojan usually designed to steal information from people who play the Facebook game Mafia Wars.

Viruses and Trojans commonly act as the beachhead for hackers to enter into secure systems in order to steal data. While hacking is glamourized on television as someone sitting in front of a computer tapping away at keys and “breaching firewalls” and such, really a lot of it is about sending a personally crafted e-mail to a person inside the network and getting them to run a program that contains malware. That malware pretends to be something innocuous—like perhaps a movie of a dog doing backflips—but behind the scenes it sets up a bolthole for the hackers to enter the system.

A great deal of training and detection systems needs to be implemented and soon before many more of these contractors are overwhelmed by the social engineering aspect of hacking.