India denies China’s cyber campaign has anything to do with the Mumbai power grid failure in 2020

Recorded Future, an intelligence supplier for big business security report alleged to uncover details of China’s cyber campaign linked group named Red Echo. However, on Monday, India denied and stated that Mumbai’s power grid failure in 2020 didn’t happen because of any malware attack from China’s cyber campaign.

However, as per the New York Times’ report cited Recorded Future COO Stuart Solomon stating that the Chinese state-supported group called Red Echo has been observed to efficiently use cyber intrusion techniques to discreetly acquire a niche in almost twelve critical nodes across the Indian power transmission and generation infrastructure. 

The Recorded Future couldn’t get access to the Indian power systems; it couldn’t check the details of the code, which was located in strategic power-distribution systems across the nation. While it has informed Indian officials, so far they are not announcing what they have discovered, NYT stated.

Soon after the report was published, China’s Foreign Ministry strongly criticized it and called it irresponsible. “China strongly opposes and takes action against all types of cyberattacks,” representative Wang Wenbin stated. 

In Oct 2020, Mumbai confronted a power outage, all trains got shut and the stock exchange failed to operate as there was no electricity in the whole of Mumbai. Clinics and hospitals had to operate on emergency generators to keep ventilators working for the coronavirus and critically ill patients.

“Swift actions are being taken by the Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) in all these control centers operated by POSOCO for any episode/warning received from different offices like NCIIPC, CERT-in, CERT-Trans, and so forth,” the statement added. 

“All domains and IPs enlisted in NCIIPC e-mail were immediately blocked with a firewall at all control centers. The log of the firewall is being checked for any connection effort towards the registered IPs and domains. Also, all systems in the control centers were cleaned and scanned by an antivirus,” it stated. 

In Mumbai, Home Minister Anil Deshmukh announced that a first Cyber Cell report on the Mumbai blackout has been submitted to the State Energy Ministry. 

The published report by Recorded Future states that “there might be proof which points out that there could be a cyber-attack. The report has been handed over to Minister Nitin Raut for probe,” Deshmukh added.