India and China reached an agreement to withdraw their troops from Bangong Lake in eastern Ladakh, but other standoff points continue to be stalled. Reports indicate that Chinese Hackers have planted malware in India’s power system to trigger power outages in Mumbai, and have targeted Indian vaccine manufacturers for infiltration.
The two sides recently reached an agreement to complete the withdrawal of troops from the standoff point at Bangong Lake, but negotiations on other standoff points in eastern Ladakh are still at an impasse with no breakthrough.
The New York Times reported today that four months after a bloody and deadly clash between Chinese and Indian forces broke out in the Galwan Valley last June, a sudden power outage in Mumbai, India’s major financial city of 20 million people 1,500 miles away, halted trains, suspended stock market trading, and forced hospitals fighting the 2019 coronavirus disease (COVID-19, Wuhan pneumonia) outbreak to switch to backup generators. Hospitals, too, had to switch to emergency power from backup generators to keep their respirators running.
However, a study by Massachusetts-based Recorded Future found that the Mumbai blackout was the work of a hacker group with ties to the Chinese Communist Party.
“Recorded Future CEO Stuart Solomon said Red Echo, an officially funded Chinese hacker group, appears to have systematically used advanced network intrusion techniques to plant malware at more than 10 key nodes throughout India’s power generation and transmission facilities.
In a statement, India’s Ministry of Power confirmed that it had been informed of a major state-managed operation by the Chinese Communist Party to infiltrate India’s power network using malware; Indian media also quoted Indian officials as saying that the Mumbai blackout was caused by a Cyber Attack on power load centers from the Chinese Communist Party.
New Delhi Television (NDTV) quoted the Indian Ministry of Foreign Affairs as saying that the relevant units had responded quickly to the Chinese Communist Party’s hacking operation and that the “threat” did not affect any facilities and no data loss or leakage was found, but the Indian Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not mention the blackout in Mumbai.
In addition to the power system, cyber intelligence firm Cyfirma told Reuters that Chinese hacker group APT10 (also known as Stone Panda) has targeted the IT infrastructure and supply chain software of two Indian vaccine manufacturers, Serum Institute and Bharat Biotech. Vulnerability infiltration.
The main objective of these Chinese hackers to penetrate the two Indian vaccine and pharmaceutical companies was to infiltrate the intellectual property of the two companies and help China gain an advantage over the Indian vaccine and pharmaceutical companies, said Kumar Ritesh, formerly a high-ranking cyber officer at MI6, the British foreign intelligence agency.
Ritesh noted that APT10 is targeting the world’s largest serum institute that makes vaccines and drugs. The Serum Institute is mass-producing the 2019 coronavirus disease (COVID-19) vaccine developed by Oxford University in the United Kingdom in collaboration with AstraZeneca and supplying it to India and many other countries, leaving the Chinese Communist Party behind India in the vaccine diplomacy war in South Asia, and the company is soon to mass-produce the U.S. Novavax vaccine.
Both the Serum Institute of India and Bharat Biotech have declined to comment on Cyfirma’s findings.
However, Cyfirma has shared its findings and evidence of the Chinese hack with the Indian government’s Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In), but CERT-In also has not yet commented.
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