Probe shows cyber attack behind outage: Minister
MUMBAI: An investigation by the Maharashtra police cyber cell found signs of a cyber attack in systems of the electricity grid network that collapsed in October last year, snapping supply to India’s financial capital for up to 12 hours.
State energy minister Nitin Raut presented the report by the cyber cell to the state assembly, and officials involved in the investigation said they were not at liberty to share more details at the moment.
According to Raut, the probe found that 14 Trojan horse malware were found on the servers and systems firewalls detected multiple intrusion attempts by blacklisted internet protocol (IP) addresses. On October 12, power supply across Mumbai went down shortly before 10am, halting trains and forcing critical infrastructure such as hospitals and the airport to switch to back-up generators.
The incident came back into focus after an American security consultancy said suspected Chinalinked attackers were carrying out an active operation against India’s electricity grid, although no direct evidence has been found yet.
Multiple investigations are underway into the Mumbai outage. Union power minister RK Singh on Tuesday said the incident was due to “human error” – an explanation that ministers in Maharashtra rejected, saying the fault may lie with a cyber attack.
The energy minister said they have also received reports of a committee of experts formed by the state government to investigate the reason for power grid failure and two other probe reports of Maharashtra Electricity Regulatory Commission and Central Electricity Authority of India (CEA).
Maharashtra’s inspector general of police (Cyber) Yashasvi Yadav, under whose supervision the investigation was conducted and the report was prepared, said: “We have submitted the investigation report to the Home minister and he has already outlined the four major findings, including the trojan horses on the server, unaccounted transfer of around 8GB of data from unidentified foreign servers, hacking attempts by blacklisted IP addresses, etc. We have explained the entire attack with proofs...”. SK Goel, chairman of the committee constituted by MERC said.
Experts said it may be too premature to blame the incident on a cyber attack. “We will have to really see what the expert committees have to say the major reason behind the outage was. Until then, it does not seem right to say that the incident was owing to a cyber attack,” said Ashok Pendse, a power expert from Mumbai.
AGRA: A 17-year-old boy was detained on Wednesday for allegedly strangling a 17-year-old Dalit girl to death after she resisted a rape attempt in Uttar Pradesh’s Aligarh district, officials said on Wednesday.
The incident took place on Sunday afternoon, when the girl went to a wheat field, owned by the family of the accused, to collect fodder and water. When she did not return home till evening, her family started a search, and her body was found in a field.
The post-mortem report showed she was strangled to death, the officials said.
According to senior superintendent of police (SSP) Muniraj G the accused took the girl to a field where he could not be seen by passersby, and strangled her with her dupatta when she resisted the rape attempt.
The police initially filed a case against an unknown persons at the Akarabad police station under Sections 376/302 (rape and murder) of the Indian Penal Code, and relevant sections of the Pocso (Protection of Children from Sexual Offences) Act.
The accused was questioned as his family owned a field near spot where the girl’s body was found, the officials said. During interrogation, he confessed to have committed the crime, the officials said.
“The accused admitted that he went to a wheat field and was watching a pornographic film on his mobile. He said that he saw the girl, and he knew her because he used to go to her house. She came for water to the field owned by the family of the accused,” the Aligarh SSP said.
Relevant sections of the Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe (Prevention of Atrocities) Act have been added to the FIR, the SSP said.
Though the most stringent punishments under some of the IPC, Pocso and SC/ST Act sections include life imprisonment and even death, minors are tried in Juvenile Court.
In 2019, Uttar Pradesh reported the most number of crimes against women, according to the National Crime Records Bureau.