Last year after the Galwan clash China allegedly tried to hack into the Indian power grid system in Mumbai – as a part of a broad Chinese cyber campaign against India.
In May 2020, Chinese and Indian troops engaged in aggressive melee, face-offs, and skirmishes at locations along the Sino-Indian border, including near the disputed Pangong Lake in Ladakh and Tibet Autonomous Region, and near the border between Sikkim and the Tibet Autonomous Region.
Then on October 12 2020 in India’s financial capital Mumbai the train shut down and the stock market closed as the power went out. Hospitals that were fighting against deadly coronavirus had to switch to emergency generators.
A new study has now revealed that Chinese Malware was allegedly behind this attack, as reported by New York Times.
The study also revealed that amidst the ongoing deadlock in the Himalayas, Chinese malware penetrated the power supply control system in India. It also included high voltage transmission substations and thermal power plants.
Recorded Future revealed this study
The Chinese cyberattack was revealed by the American cyber firm Recorded Future. However, the company also found that most malware was never activated.
Stuart Solomon, Recorded Future’s chief operating officer, said to New York Times that the Chinese state-sponsored group, which the firm named Red Echo, “has been seen to systematically utilize advanced cyber intrusion techniques to quietly gain a foothold in nearly a dozen critical nodes across the Indian power generation and transmission infrastructure.”
The investigators who wrote the Recorded Future study, said that “the alleged link between the outage and the discovery of the unspecified malware” in the system “remains unsubstantiated.” But they noted that “additional evidence suggested the coordinated targeting of the Indian load dispatch centers,” which balance the electrical demands across regions of the country.
Last year, there was a severe power crisis in Mumbai. The grid had failed in the Mumbai metropolitan area. The power supply company Best (BEST) in Mumbai Township had said that the grids had failed from the power supply plant.
