A power outage in India’s financial hub of Mumbai last October paralyzed rail operations, and foreign media revealed that it was linked to the Chinese Communist Party.
Four months after the bloody clashes between India and China at the Galwan Valley border in June last year, which even resulted in deaths and injuries on both sides, a power outage suddenly occurred in Mumbai, India’s financial hub, more than 2,000 kilometers away. Some foreign media broke the news that the blackout is related to the Sino-Indian border conflict.
According to a report in the New York Times on February 28, a research report shows that when the bloody conflict between India and China broke out in the Himalayas, Chinese malware broke in to manage the power supply across India, including high-voltage DC transmission substations and coal-fired power plant control systems.
The Boston-based cyber intelligence firm Recorded Future has pieced together a picture of the massive influx of Chinese malware, finding a particular situation where most of the software did not start after it entered the power system.
“Stuart Solomon, chief operating officer of Recorded Future, noted that a Beijing-funded company called Red Echo has systematically used advanced cyber intrusion techniques to surreptitiously gain access to the power systems of power generation and transmission infrastructure across India. 12 critical nodes within India’s power generation and transmission infrastructure. This raises questions about whether the blackout in Mumbai, one of India’s busiest commercial hubs, on October 13 last year signaled a warning from Beijing that if New Delhi pushes its border claims too hard, the future could be bad for India.
It’s worth noting that the massive blackout in Mumbai came at a Time when the Wuhan pneumonia Epidemic (a Chinese Communist virus epidemic) was so severe that not only did the blackout cause trains to stop running and the stock market to close, but even Indian hospitals had to switch to emergency generators to keep their ventilators running.
When the blackout occurred in Mumbai, Indian officials said that the cause of the local blackout originated from a Chinese Cyber Attack, and the Indian government promised at the time that it would conduct an investigation and announce the results in the coming weeks. But later Indian officials did not announce the cause of the blackout in Mumbai. The newspaper cited analysis that this may be due to the fact that India is still looking for the nodes held by the Chinese side. On the other hand, it is possible, as one former Indian diplomat suggested, that Beijing’s involvement could complicate recent efforts by India and China to find diplomatic ways to try to reduce tensions along the border.
Following a report in New Times that Chinese Hackers had attacked India’s power grid system, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin responded at a regular press conference on March 1. He said that the news was “irresponsible and has an ulterior motive,” and that “such a practice is not only irresponsible but also has an ulterior motive. China is firmly opposed to this.”
However, a review of past records shows that recent thefts of information from other countries by Chinese hackers have been frequent.
In August 2020, Indian security agencies released a report showing that the Chinese Communist military’s cyber army unit, number 61398, had long been collecting sensitive intelligence and information on the world’s networks, space, and geographic locations, and that the unit was later found to be very active in hacking India. This includes India’s first homemade nuclear-powered submarine ship, the INS Arihant, which can launch nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles underwater, and India’s procurement of P8I maritime patrol aircraft from the United States, among other sensitive information.
Not only that, Indian cyber security organizations have disclosed to the media late last year that hackers from China launched cyber attacks on millions of Indian consumers during Indian online shopping promotions in October and November 2020, and that hackers collected personal information from Indian consumers by creating “e-commerce scams”.
The latest news from Reuters said that in recent weeks, a hacker group backed by the Chinese government has targeted the information technology (IT) systems of two Indian vaccine manufacturers, both of which produce the Wuhan pneumonia vaccine used in India’s vaccination program. The Chinese Foreign Ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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