Industrial Automation Magazine India

Did hackers cause the Mumbai power outage in October 2020?

Published on : Tuesday 02-03-2021

A NYT report suggests China-linked groups cyberattack on India could have led to Mumbai power outage last year.

A US-based company in its latest study has raising suspicion whether the massive power outage in Mumbai on October 12, 2020 was the result of the online intrusion by RedEcho, a China-linked threat activity.

Recorded Future, a Massachusetts-based company which studies the use of the internet by state actors, in its recent report details the campaign conducted by a China-linked threat activity group RedEcho targeting the Indian power sector. The activity was identified through a combination of large-scale automated network traffic analytics and expert analysis.

Data sources include the Recorded Future Platform, SecurityTrails, Spur, Farsight and common open-source tools and techniques, the report said.

On October 12, a grid failure in Mumbai resulted in massive power outages, stopping trains on tracks, hampering those working from home amidst the Covid-19 pandemic and hitting the stuttering economic activity hard.

In its report, Recorded Future notified the appropriate Indian government departments prior to publication of the suspected intrusions to support incident response and remediation investigations within the impacted organisations.

Since early 2020, Recorded Future's Insikt Group observed a large increase in suspected targeted intrusion activity against Indian organisations from the Chinese state-sponsored group.

Ten distinct Indian power sector organisations, including four of the five Regional Load Despatch Centres responsible for operation of the power grid through balancing electricity supply and demand, have been identified as targets in a concerted campaign against India's critical infrastructure.

Recorder Future alleged that it also observed the suspected Indian state-sponsored group Sidewinder target Chinese military and government entities in 2020, in activity overlapping with recent Trend Micro research.