NEW DELHI – Indian officials are investigating whether cyber attacks from China may have caused a power outage in Mumbai last year.
State officials in Maharashtra, of which Mumbai is the capital, said on Monday that an initial investigation by the cyber department had found evidence that China could have been behind a power outage that left millions of people without power in October.
It was the worst power outage in decades in India’s financial capital, stopping trains and forcing hospitals to switch to diesel generators. The megacity has long prided itself on being one of the few cities in India with an uninterrupted power supply, even though most of the country suffers from frequent power cuts.
Anil Deshmukh, the state’s interior minister, said officials were looking into a possible link between the power outage and a wave of cyber attacks on the state-owned servers. He wouldn’t pick China, but said investigators had found evidence of more than a dozen Trojan horse attacks and suspicious data transfers to state-owned power companies’ servers.
“Attempts have been made to log into our servers from abroad,” said Mr. Deshmukh. “We will investigate further.”