Union Power Minister R.K. Singh has said that the Mumbai power outage of October 2020 was caused by “human error” and there is no evidence to prove that it was trigged due to a cyber attack by China, according to reliable media reports.
“Two teams investigated the power outage and reported that the outage was caused by human error and not due to cyber attack. One of the teams submitted that cyber attacks did happen but they were not linked to the Mumbai grid failure,” Singh was quoted saying.
“The cyber attacks happened on our northern and southern region load dispatch centers. However, the malware could not reach our operating system. Maharashtra Home Minister has informed that cyber-attacks happened on their SCADA system in Mumbai,” the Minister added.
Union Power Minister added there is no evidence to say that the cyber attacks were carried out whether 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,” Singh said.
“We are already alert about this. Our transmission system can be shut out by a cyber attack. We had set up a committee concerning this two years ago and received recommendations from the committee. We were cautious before and will be cautious in future because this danger has not yet gone,” the power minister added.
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Singh’s remark follows a statement put out by the union power ministry yesterday which said there was no impact on operations of Power System Operation Corporation (POSOCO) due to any malware attack.
Source of news: Economic Times
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