No clear link to blame Mumbai outage on cyber sabotage, Maharashtra report says

On 12 October 2020, large parts of Mumbai and Thane faced an unusual power outage. An NYT report says the disruption could be part of a larger Chinese cyber campaign.

An aerial view of Mumbai | Wikimedia Commons

Mumbai: Following fears of a possible cyber attack being responsible for last year’s power outage in Mumbai, senior officials from the Maharashtra government said there were sabotage attempts, but there is no clear link to blame the power supply disruption on these attempts.

Based on a preliminary inquiry report there is no link between the cyber attack and the power outage of 12 October 2020 in parts of Mumbai, and that the system is completely secure, said two senior officials from Maharashtra’s energy and home departments who didn’t wish to be named.

“It can be surmised that there were attempts to get into the system through different malware, but the attacks were not successful. It still can’t be said conclusively that the power outage was because of the malware,” a senior official from the state home department said.

“If their attempts had been successful it wouldn’t even have been possible for us to detect that there were attempts to get into the system,” he said, adding, “Our system is a 100 per cent secure.”

On 12 October last year, large parts of Mumbai and Thane faced an unusual power outage. Local trains were stuck midway on tracks and hospitals had to operate on back-up generators at a time when the city was battling the worst of the Covid pandemic. The outage lasted for about two hours, but some areas had to bear the brunt for nearly 10 hours.

A 28 February New York Times report said a stream of Chinese malware had been “flowing into the control systems” in charge of India’s electricity distribution and the power disruption in Mumbai could be a part of a larger Chinese cyber campaign against India’s power grid.

‘Maharashtra knew about this much earlier’

The home department official said the Maharashtra government knew about the attempted malware attacks much earlier, “but we had to come out (now) and inform the public through a press conference because the information had leaked out in the news media”.

On Monday, Maharashtra Home Minister Anil Deshmukh addressed a press conference saying Energy Minister Nitin Raut had suspected cyber sabotage last year itself and requested the home department to inquire into it.

The state cyber cell submitted a preliminary report to the energy department at the press conference.

“The report indicates a possibility of cyber sabotage… there is evidence of an attempt to inset 14 Trojan horses in the system. They have also said that there is a possibility of the transfer of 8GB data from foreign networks to the MSEB (Maharashtra State Electricity Board) server,” Deshmukh said.

A senior official from the state energy department who did not wish to be identified told ThePrint, “The link has not been established. Preliminary report only says there is a possibility. We have asked the cyber cell to investigate further as well as take measures to prevent such attempts. They have appointed technical experts and started work.”

According to the state energy department’s conclusion, the power outage was due to the tripping of two of the four main power transmission lines, he added. A third had already broken down as a conductor had snapped two days earlier.

Mumbai’s islanding system, where the city’s power network isolates itself during a state grid failure to continue supply to the city, collapsed because of insufficient supply as one power plant had tripped, he added.