No impact on POSOCO operations: Centre

New Delhi: The Ministry of Power on Monday said there is no impact on operations of Power System Operation Corporation (POSOCO) due to any malware attack and that prompt actions are taken on advisories issued against such threats.

The ministry was responding to a study carried out by a private US company which suggested that a China-linked group targeted India's power grid system through malware, a software designed to cause damage to a computer network. This study raised suspicion whether last year's massive power outage in Mumbai was a result of the online intrusion. However, the ministry did not mention about the Mumbai outage in its statement. Responding on the findings of the study, the ministry said, "There is no impact on any of the functionalities carried out by POSOCO due to the referred threat. No data breach/ data loss has been detected due to these incidents."

The ministry further said, "Prompt actions are being taken by the CISOs (chief information security officers) at all these control centres under operation by POSOCO for any incident/advisory received from various agencies like CERT-in, NCIIPC, CERT-Trans etc." The CERT-in (Indian Computer Emergency Response Team) is the nodal agency to deal with cyber security threats like hacking and phishing. The NCIIPC (National Critical Information Infrastructure Protection Centre (NCIIPC) is national nodal agency for critical information infrastructure protection.