China hackers did not penetrate grids: Govt

Red Echo, a hacker group affiliated with the Chinese government, repeatedly targeted the control rooms that manage India’s critical power grids in a massive campaign that could have caused widespread blackouts.

The Chinese hackers, however, failed to break into the systems, and no data breach was detected because of the attacks, India’s power ministry said on Monday in response to a story published in The New York Times that linked last year’s grid failure in Mumbai to the Chinese cyberattacks.

The US newspaper reported on Sunday that the blackouts in Mumbai on 12 October were linked to attacks carried out by Red Echo, a shadowy state-backed hacker group. The power outage in Mumbai disrupted emergency services, brokerages and halted local trains, considered the lifeline of India’s financial capital.