'Human error, no proof of China’s role’: RK Singh on Mumbai power outage

New Delhi, Mar 02: Union Power minister R K Singh said on Tuesday that that the massive grid failure, which hit financial capital Mumbai was "caused by human error and not due to cyber attack".

"There is no evidence to prove that the October 2020 electricity blackout in Mumbai was caused by a cyberattack perpetrated by China or Pakistan," Singh said.

"Some people say that the group behind the attacks is Chinese but we don't have evidence. China will definitely deny it," the minister said.

"Two teams investigated the power outage. One of the teams submitted that cyber attack did happen but they were not linked to the Mumbai grid failure," he said.

A massive power outage in Mumbai in October may have been the handiwork of China, a report said.

The outage which stopped trains and shut down hospitals may be linked to a Chinese threat activity, the report says. The report says that a China linked threat activity group, RedEcho targeted the Indian power sector. The links to the Mumbai outage provides additional evidence suggesting the coordinated targeting of Indian Load Dispatch Centres, the report further stated.

The flow of Malware was pieced together by Recorded Future, a US based company that studies the use of internet by state actors. It found that most of the malware was never activated. Because Recorded Future could not get inside India's power systems, it could not examine the details of the code itself.

"From mid-2020, Recorded Future's midpoint collection revealed a steep rise in the use of infrastructure tracked as AXIOMATICASYMPTOTE, which encompasses ShadowPad command and control servers, to target a large swathe of India's power sector.