'Cyber sabotage not confined to Mumbai’, says HM Deshmukh

The Minister briefs Union Minister RK Singh on the matter

A day af ter the NYT report on Mumbai power outage due to Chinese cyberattack, the Maharashtra Home Minister Anil Deshmukh said the NYT report speaks about threat to entire Indian vital infrastructure. He further noted that the Chinese cyberattack or cyber sabotage was not just confined to Mumbai but could have been spread across the country. He also briefed Union Power Minister RK Singh over the same. Deshmukh said Singh also expressed concern over the issue saying that all states should be vigilant.

Cyber-attack issue is not just confined to Mumbai but it could spread across the country. We should not politicise this issue. I have spoken to Union Minister RK Singh about this. He has sought details about it and said that we should remain alert," said Deshmukh at the Vidhan Bhavan.

On Monday, the Maharashtra Government took cognisance of a New York Times report claiming that the Mumbai power outage on October 12, 2020, was because of Chinese cyberattack.

The Mumbai Cyber Cell, in its report, which has been submitted by Home Minister Anil Deshmukh to Power Minister Nitin Raut, has alleged that there was an attempt to hack the servers of the MSEB in Mumbai. The Cyber Cell has hinted that the transmission server is believed to have been hacked. According to the Cyber Cell, evidence has been found that about 14 Trojan horses tried to enter the MSEB Mumbai system. Further, 8 GB of data may have been transferred from an external server to MSEB's server. An attempt may have been made to log into MSEB's server from a blacklisted IP address. Raut said he will table the Cyber Cell report in the state legislature on Wednesday. Earlier, Singh had ruled out the power breakdown due to cyberattack but said it was due to manual error as the findings of the report were prepared by two teams. ‘’There is “no evidence of cyber-attacks by China” during Mumbai’s power outage that happened in October 2020. “Two teams investigated the power outage and submitted that the outage was caused by human error and not due to cyberattack,’’ he noted.

Meanwhile, former energy minister Chandrashekhar Bawankule said power failure cannot take place due to cyberattack as the electricity system is manually operated still.