Hindustan Times (Noida)

‘Human error, not China hack attack, behind Mumbai outage’

- Letters@hindustant­imes.com

NEW DELHI/MUMBAI: A power outage in Mumbai in October 2020 was caused by “human error”, not cyber attack, Union power minister RK Singh told a news agency on Tuesday, a day after reports suggested Chinese government-linked actors were targeting Indian critical infrastruc­ture.

Shortly after Singh’s comments, Maharashtr­a’s power minister Nitin Raut said a report of an investigat­ion by the state into the incident will be tabled in the assembly on Wednesday, without revealing what the findings were.

“Two teams investigat­ed the power outage and reported that the outage was caused by human error and not due to cyber attack. One of the teams submitted that cyber attacks did happen but they were not linked to the Mumbai grid failure,” said Singh, while speaking to ANI.

“Cyber attacks happened on our northern and southern region load dispatch centres. However, the malware could not reach our operating system. Maharashtr­a home minister has informed that cyber-attacks happened on their Supervisor­y Control And Data Acquisitio­n (SCADA) system in Mumbai,” the minister added.

In Mumbai, Raut said he will table in the assembly on Wednesday all the reports on the October 12 outage, which lasted up to 12 hours in some parts of India’s financial capital, bringing the city’s local trains to a halt and forcing the airport to switch to back-up supply.

Responding to Union minister Singh’s “human error” remark, he said: “Let them say what they want to. Wait for their reactions after I table the findings in the assembly.”

Separately, Maharashtr­a home minister Anil Deshmukh, who on Monday had said the incident was indeed due to a cyber attack, added on Tuesday: “Cyber-attack issue is not just confined to Mumbai but it could spread across the country. We should not politicise this issue.”

The October incident was back in the spotlight after American cyber intelligen­ce company Recorded Future said it had uncovered a suspected Chinalinke­d cyber operation that was focussed on India’s electricit­y grid and other critical infrastruc­ture. While the company did not link the Mumbai incident to the operation (which it titled Redecho) it discovered, it did not rule out a link.

According to Recorded Future, Redecho deployed a malware known as Shadowpad, which has been previously linked to Chinese cyber soldiers. Shadowpad has the ability to hand over systems controls to malicious hackers, who can then make potentiall­y catastroph­ic to sensitive industrial systems.

The power ministry in a statement on Monday said it had received inputs from domestic agencies about the targeting by Shadowpad separately.

None of the government officials have implicated China for the cyber operation, an attributio­n that experts say is difficult in such instances and carries diplomatic risks.

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