No 'Sabotage' Behind Mumbai Power Outage, Chinese Hacking Attempt a Month Later: Power Minister Rubbishing claims that t...

No 'Sabotage' Behind Mumbai Power Outage, Chinese Hacking Attempt a Month Later: Power Minister

Rubbishing claims that the Mumbai power outage in October last year was the result of a Chinese cyber-attack or possible sabotage, Union Power Minister R K Singh told CNN-News18’s Arunima that the cause was instead “human error”. A team of experts in their report to the Power Ministry blamed the engineer and operator on duty for lapses that lead to the outage in Mumbai, Singh said.

Singh’s remarks came after Maharashtra Energy Minister Nitin Raut said that the Mumbai outage was caused by a cyberattack” and it was an act of “sabotage”. Interacting with media persons, Raut said the state government, the Maharashtra Electricity Regulatory Commission (MERC) and the Central Electricity Authority had set up separate committees to probe the cause of the power outage and their reports have been received. “We had then complained to the cyber cell and their report is awaited. But the preliminary information I have, there definitely was a cyber attack and it was sabotage,” he said.

We had sent a team to Mumbai and their conclusion was that there were some mistakes by the operators and those who handle state transmission system. So they have identified the point where mistakes happened and I will be writing to state government so that they can call for an explanation and take action,” Singh asserted contradicting Raut.

On the New York Times report which claimed Chinese attempts to attack India’s power grid, the Union power minister said such an attempt was made but he said it was in November, a month after the Mumbai blackout. “Some cyber-attack/hacking attempts were made at our load dispatch centre in November and our CERT-IN sort of alerted our centre. Those centres carried out an audit. The points which the hackers tried to breach were blocked,” he said.