NEW DELHI – Indian officials are investigating whether Chinese cyber attacks could have been behind an outage in Mumbai last year.
State officials in Maharashtra, whose capital is Mumbai, said Monday that an initial investigation by its cyber department found evidence that China could be behind an power outage that left millions without power in October. .
It has been the worst disruption in India’s financial capital in decades, stopping trains and causing hospitals to switch to diesel generators. The mega-city has long been proud to be one of the few cities in India with uninterrupted energy sources, even though most of the country is struggling with regular outages.
Anil Deshmukh, the state’s interior minister, said officials are investigating a possible link between stopping and increasing cyber attacks on the state’s electricity service servers. He will not identify China, but said investigators found evidence of more than a dozen Trojan horse attacks, as well as suspicious data transfers to the servers of state-owned power companies.
“There have been attempts to connect to our servers in foreign countries,” said Mr Deshmukh. “We will investigate further.”