Sino-pak nexus targeted Indian power generation capacity

hackers carried out a significant cyberattack on India-based power generation and transmission organizations and as per reports, the attack is still continuing. The hackers have also targeted infrastructure assets in Afghanistan, but most of their “victims” are based in India.

The hackers were/are using the internet platform provided by China Mobile Limited that works in Pakistan under the brand name Zong 4G. The Chinese government controls China Mobile Limited through China Mobile Communications Group Company Limited, which has 100% ownership of China Mobile Group Limited, which in turn holds 70% stake of China Mobile Limited—the remaining 30 percent is with public investors.

The collaboration between China and Pakistan in the field of cyber warfare, especially against Indian interest, is well documented and has been described as a prominent concern by Indian officials who track such developments. China has invested billions of dollars, most of them as a part of the CPEC funding, to develop cyber capabilities in Pakistan, including material and human assets.

During this present attack, Pakistan-based actors were able to steal critical files, delete, take screenshots, copy files, create directory, rename files, run commands, shut down systems and run a process on the computer systems that was/is being used by these Indian infrastructures.

The attack started in January this year and used decoy PDF documents which were named in a way to give the impression that these were associated with the organizations that were being targeted.

Some of the files were named as: Engrcorpspolicy.zip, vaccination. zip,call-for-proposal-dgsp-coas-chair-excellance. PDF.LNK,DATE-OD-NEXT