Cyber Attack On Pakistan’s NTDC Causes Nationwide Power Outage

As per our sources, the National Power Transmission Company of Pakistan (NTDC) has been hacked and as a result, whole of the country’s Power has remained shutdown for more than 24 hours on 23rd January, 2023.

National Transmission & Despatch Company or NTDC is a Power Transmission Company, under the Ministry of Energy, which controls all the grid stations and transmission lines across Pakistan.

The Hackers have shared images of NTDC Management Panel claiming the hack in Telegram Groups.

Another group shared the login screen of this panel which discloses the domain name of the NTDC website.

As per the analysts, the hackers modified the frequency values in the NTDC panel which forced the operators to feed wrong data and as a result grid stations got tripped and caused the country wide power outage.

According to Cyber Security Analysts, the threat actor behind this attack is SideWinder APT.

SideWinder APT is a notorious Indian state sponsored hacking group known for multiple Cyber Attacks on Pakistan in the past.

It is estimated that Pakistan has lost about Rupees 100 Billion ($400M) as a result of this outage.

If these claims are legit, this is the largest Cyber Attack on Pakistan in history.

However, Pakistan’s Ministry of Energy has denied the reports of any hacking and labeled them as rumors.

Multiple countries have faced Cyber Attacks on their Power Systems in past i.e. The 2015 Ukraine Power Grid Hack.

Update (28th January, 2023):
Hackers have shared more data on their Telegram channel, which includes screenshots and a zip file containing source code of the NTDC Tripping Website.

The zipped file named tripping.NTDC.COM.PK.zip also contains Power Infrastructure related diagrams, Database backups and PHP source code files.

The Ministry of Energy has now given the statement that they are investigating a possible Security Breach.

The Tripping Website of NTDC, https://tripping.ntdc.com.pk/ is now down showing a 403 Forbidden message.

This is a developing story so stay tuned for updates.