Maharashtra Home Minister Anil Deshmukh on Tuesday said the Chinese cyber attack or cyber sabotage is not just confined to Mumbai but could have been spread across the country. He also briefed Union Power Minister RK Singh over the same.
"Cyber-attack issue is not just confined to Mumbai but it could spread across the country. We should not politicise this issue. I have spoken to Union Minister RK Singh about this. He has sought details about it and said that we should remain alert," Deshmukh told reporters.
On Monday, the Maharashtra Government took cognisance of a New York Times report claiming that the Mumbai power outage on October 12, 2020, was because of Chinese cyber attack.
The Mumbai Cyber Cell, in its report, which has been submitted by Home Minister Anil Deshmukh to Power Minster Nitin Raut, has alleged that there was an attempt to hack the servers of the MSEB in Mumbai. The Cyber Cell has hinted that the transmission server is believed to have been hacked.
According to the Cyber Cell, evidence has been found that about 14 Trojan horses tried to enter the MSEB Mumbai system. Further, 8 GB of data may have been transferred from an external server to MSEB's server. An attempt may have been made to log into MSEB's server from a blacklisted IP address.
For the uninitiated, the power outage which happened on October 12 last year, came months after the clash between the Indian and Chinese troops in Galwan valley in June 2020. A grid failure in Mumbai had resulted in the massive power outage, stopping trains on tracks, hampering those working from home amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, and hitting the economic activity hard.
Meanwhile, Nitin Raut said that he will table all the reports on the power outage in the Maharashtra Assembly tomorrow.