Mumbai power outage due to human error not cyber attack, says Union Power Minister R K Singh

While a cyber attack was attempted on power installations, it had nothing to do with the electricity blackout in Mumbai, said the minister

A day after Maharashtra Energy Minister Nitin Raut claimed that the power outage in Mumbai in October last year was caused by a "cyberattack" and it was an act of "sabotage", Union Power Minister R K Singh on Tuesday said that it was a result of “human error”.

While a cyber attack was attempted on power installations, it had nothing to do with the October 2020 electricity blackout in Mumbai, said the minister.

"Two teams investigated the power outage and submitted that the issue was caused by human error and not due to cyber attack. One of the teams submitted that the cyber attack did happen but they were not linked to the Mumbai grid failure," Singh said .

The Union Minister further said that the cyber attacks affected the northern and southern region's load dispatch centres but they (malware) could not reach the operating system.

On allegation of Chinese government's connection to the malware, the minister said,"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."

The Power Minister was responding after a study report conducted by Recorded Future, a Massachusetts-based company, suggested that a Chinese government linked group targeted India''s power grid system through malware, a software designed to cause damage to a computer network.

Read: Chinese hackers target SII, Bharat Biotech, says security firm

The study raised doubts that last year''s massive power outage in Mumbai was a result of the online intrusion.

Admitting that there was an attempt to attack electricity grid system in the country, the Ministry of Power on Monday in a statement had said that an email was received from CERT-In on November 19, 2020 on the threat of malware called Shadow Pad at some control centres of POSOCO. Accordingly, action was taken to address these threats, he had said.

"There is no impact on any of the functionalities carried out by Power System Operation Corporation (POSOCO) due to the referred threat. No data breach/ data loss has been detected due to these incidents," the statement had said.