Mumbai power outage: Centre denies there was any cyberattack

Minister of State for Power RK Singh

A day after the Maharashtra government claimed the possibility of a cyberattack being responsible for last October's power outage in Mumbai, Minister of State for Power RK Singh ruled out sabotage by China or Pakistan-supported hackers.

Former state energy minister Chandrashekhar Bawankule

Maharashtra's former energy minister Chandrashekhar Bawankule said the MVA ministers lied to mask a failure in grid management and that the existing power network is not as advanced for facilitating a malware attack.

In a media interaction in New Delhi, Singh said the probes conducted by experts had established human error as the reason. However, he said some cyberattacks on India's northern and southern load despatch centres were reported, but the malware could not reach the controlling system.

Maharashtra Home Minister Anil Deshmukh had said on Monday that the Cyber Department established possibilities based on evidence found while analysing the SCADA (Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition) system of the state electricity transmission network. He did not name any country or entity, saying that the report was preliminary and could be worked upon for further investigation.

Deshmukh said he discussed the matter with Singh on Tuesday. "The union minister called me and sought details. He said all states need to be alert if anything of this sort is happening," he said, adding that he had mentioned Mumbai's blackout while discussing The New York Times report that said that the outage was a part of a cybercampaign by a Chinese state-sponsored group, intended to warn India if it presses its border claims too hard.

A big lie: Bawankule
Bawankule said, "They have asked an IPS officer to prepare a report of cyberattack. If there were malware attacks from a foreign country, the officer should have intimated the development to the central ministries and related departments. It seems the report was made after the news report."

A shop in Thane during the power grid failure in October 2020

He said the state's electricity transmission and distribution network wasn't very advanced. "At present, everything is operated manually. We need at least R50,000 crore to build a sophisticated and advanced network. The existing network cannot be manipulated by cyberattacks. The probe has proved that human error and bad management of the grid caused the blackout," said Bawankule, adding that he would write to the Centre to conduct a probe and prove wrong the MVA's claims.