Did China's cyber attack on India lead to Mumbai power outage last year? Here's the truth

Mumbai's power outage in October 2020, which was said to be the worst power failure in decades, may have its links to the India and China border tensions, a new report says. On October 12 last year, Mumbai faced a massive power outage that lasted for a few hours starting from 10 am, however, the issue was resolved by noon.

According to a report in New York Times, the malware tracing was done by Recorded Future, a cybersecurity company founded in 2009, headquartered in Somerville, Massachusetts. The company claims that most of the malware was not activated, which may mean that a small proportion of malware caused the Mumbai power outage.

The NYT report stated that China targeted India's power grid system when the two nations were engaged in an intense face-off in Ladakh.

However, Central Power Minister RK Singh told Zee News that the technical reason behind the power cut in Mumbai in October was not the cyber attack. He further added that though there were cases of a cyber attack on some power grids in November, but that did not happen in Mumbai.

Speaking to Zee News about the same, Cyber Expert Prashant Mali said, "This attack on Mumbai's grid is being called a 'Chinese' attack, which is an electric grid computer, there is already a malware inserted in it. China often puts such Malware. Through this, they get the remote control of the entire system, which causes the computer to shut down and cause a complete blackout."

Maharashtra Energy Minister Nitin Raut, on Monday, also told news agency ANI, "When the power went out in Mumbai, I had said that there was something wrong and had constituted 3 committees to probe. I feel media reports that have surfaced are true."

A blog post published by Recorded Future read, "From mid-2020 onwards, Recorded Future's midpoint collection revealed a steep rise in the use of infrastructure tracked as AXIOMATICASYMPTOTE, which encompasses ShadowPad command and control (C2) servers, to target a large swathe of India's power sector. 10 distinct Indian power sector organizations, including 4 of the 5 Regional Load Despatch Centres (RLDC) responsible for the operation of the power grid through balancing electricity supply and demand, have been identified as targets in a concerted campaign against India's critical infrastructure. Other targets identified included 2 Indian seaports."

It further added, "Despite some overlaps with previous groups, Insikt Group does not currently believe there is enough evidence to firmly attribute the activity in this particular campaign to an existing public group and therefore continue to track it as a closely related but distinct activity group, RedEcho."

For the uninformed, Mumbai was hit by a massive power outage on October 12, 2020, bringing the country's financial capital to a grinding halt. Back then, Tata Power had attributed the power outage to a simultaneous substation tripping at state-run transmission company MSETCL's two substations in the suburbs of Kalwa and Kharghar. 

(Inputs from Rajiv Ranjan)