Chinese government-linked hackers targeted Indias power grid system: US firm

A US company said on Monday a Chinese government-linked group of hackers targeted India’s critical power grid system through malware, reported PTI. Amidst the tense border tension between India and China, the development has raised suspicion whether last year’s massive power outage in Mumbai was a result of the online intrusion.

Recorded Future, which is  Massachusetts-based company which studies the use of the internet by state actors, mentioned in its recent report, the details of the campaign conducted by a China-linked threat activity group RedEcho targeting the Indian power sector.

A combination of large-scale automated network traffic analytics and expert analysis identified the activity. According to the report, data sources include the Recorded Future Platform, SecurityTrails, Spur, Farsight and common open-source tools and techniques.

The Ministry of Power said on Monday that there is no impact on operations of Power System Operation Corporation (POSOCO) due to any malware attack and that prompt actions are taken on advisories issued against such threats.

The ministry said, “There is no impact on any of the functionalities carried out by POSOCO due to the referred threat. No data breach/ data loss has been detected due to these incidents.”

It added, “Prompt actions are being taken by the CISOs (chief information security officers) at all these control centres under operation by POSOCO for any incident/advisory received from various agencies like CERT-in, NCIIPC, CERT-Trans etc.”

The ministry has, however, not mentioned about the Mumbai outage in its statement. A grid failure in Mumbai on October 12 resulted in massive power outages, stopping trains on tracks, hampering those working from home amidst the COVID-19 pandemic and hitting the economic activity hard.