MVA govt takes cognizance of alleged Chinese cyber attack which led to Mumbai power outage

Maharashtra government has taken cognizance of the report which claimed that the Chinese cyber attack that caused the power breakdown in Mumbai in October last year.

Talking to reporters, Maharashtra energy minister Nitin Raut also stated that the cyber cell will submit report today.

Followed by the power outage,talking to the Free Press Journal Raut had hinted at the possibility of cyber attack.

China launched a cyber campaign hit against India’s power grid targeting Mumbai on October 13 last year, in a warning message after the tension at the Ladakh border, reporteed NYT.

The New York Times has reported that a new study lends weight to the idea that those two events may have been connected – as part of a broad Chinese cyber campaign against India’s power grid, timed to send a message that if India pressed its claims too hard, the lights could go out across the country.

“The study shows that as the battles raged in the Himalayas, taking at least two dozen lives, Chinese malware was flowing into the control systems that manage electric supply across India, along with a high-voltage transmission substation and a coal-fired power plant”, NYT said.

The report said the flow of malware was pieced together by Recorded Future, a Somerville, Massachusetts, company that studies the use of the internet by state actors. It found that most of the malware was never activated.”

And because Recorded Future could not get inside India’s power systems, it could not examine the details of the code itself, which was placed in strategic power-distribution systems across the country. While it has notified Indian authorities, so far they are not reporting what they have found”, NYT said.

Stuart Solomon, Recorded Future’s chief operating officer, said that the Chinese state-sponsored group, which the firm named Red Echo, “has been seen to systematically utilize advanced cyber intrusion techniques to quietly gain a foothold in nearly a dozen critical nodes across the Indian power generation and transmission infrastructure.”

The discovery raises the question about whether an outage that struck in October in Mumbai, one of the country’s busiest business hubs, was meant as a message from Beijing about what might happen if India pushed its border claims too vigorously, NYT said.

(With inputs from IANS)