Union Power minister R K Singh said on Tuesday that the government is not in possession of any evidence which can prove that the October 2020 power outage in Mumbai was caused by a cyber attack carried out by either China or Pakistan.
“We don't have evidence to say that the cyber-attacks were carried out by China or Pakistan. Some people say that the group behind the attacks is Chinese but we don't have evidence. China will definitely deny it,” news agency ANI said quoting Singh.
He also said that two teams had conducted an investigation and found “human error” to be the reason behind the power outage.
“Two teams investigated the power outage and submitted that the outage was caused by human error & not due to cyber attack. One of the teams submitted that a cyber attack did happen but they were not linked to the Mumbai grid failure,” Singh told reporters.
The minister acknowledged that cyber attacks were carried out on the country’s southern and northern region load dispatch centres but they were not able to reach the main operating system.
Singh’s remarks comes on the heels of claims made by Maharashtra home minister Anil Deshmukh who on Monday blamed a cyber-attack behind the power outage in Mumbai in October last year. Citing a preliminary report of the Maharashtra police’s cyber cell, Deshmukh told reporters, “Some 14 trojan horses may have been introduced in the server of the Maharashtra State Electricity Board, and data of around 8GB may have been transferred from unaccounted foreign servers.”
{{/usCountry}}Singh’s remarks comes on the heels of claims made by Maharashtra home minister Anil Deshmukh who on Monday blamed a cyber-attack behind the power outage in Mumbai in October last year. Citing a preliminary report of the Maharashtra police’s cyber cell, Deshmukh told reporters, “Some 14 trojan horses may have been introduced in the server of the Maharashtra State Electricity Board, and data of around 8GB may have been transferred from unaccounted foreign servers.”
{{/usCountry}}On October 12, 2020, a grid failure resulted in massive power outage in Mumbai and its suburban areas. Power for essential services came back after two hours, the rest ofMumbai was plunged into darkness for quite some time as power was restored in a phased manner.