Digital Threat Report 2025-26

Why in News?

Recently, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), along with CERT‑In, CSIRT‑Fin, and SISA, released the 2^nd edition of the Digital Threat Report 2025‑26.

• Digital Threat Report – The report gives financial institutions, regulators, and cybersecurity leaders a clear overview of threats affecting banking, insurance, and digital payments.

Key Highlights

• The report highlights AI asymmetry and emerging cyber trends reshaping financial security for India’s Banking, Financial Services and Insurance (BFSI) and payments ecosystems.
• Rapid Threat Evolution – Six of seven predictions from last year’s report have already materialised.
• Shrinking gap between threat emergence and exploitation (from years to months/weeks).
• Established Attack Methods – Social engineering, credential theft, supply‑chain compromise, and cloud exploitation are now mainstream.
• Modern attacks blend into normal activities (like logins or payments), making them look legitimate and very difficult to spot before damage happens.
• Cyber Resilience – India’s financial system is highly connected, so one breach can spread across markets and economies.
• The report calls for ongoing risk checks, real‑time responses, and information sharing instead of occasional audits.
• Nature of Attacks – Breaches often appear as legitimate sessions, approved payments, manipulated workflows, or ordinary user behaviour, making detection harder.
• AI Asymmetry – Low‑resource attackers can now use AI to perform activities at machine speed, outpacing defensive and regulatory mechanisms.
• Anatomy of Cyber Failure – Introduces a 4‑Layer Gap Archetype Framework, to analyse how modern breaches escalate.
• A major cyber failure is not caused by one weakness but by a chain of small gaps.
• Roadmap – Sets an 18‑month plan to guide financial institutions from basic security controls to building continuous, resilient security systems

Institutional Roles

• Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) – National nodal agency under IT Amendment Act 2008 for responding to computer security incidents.
• Computer Security Incident Response Team in Finance (CSIRT-Fin) – A nodal sectoral CSIRT for India’s financial sector that provides incident prevention, response, and security quality management services.
• SISA – Global cybersecurity leader for the payments ecosystem; secures 1,000+ organisations across 40+ countries using breach intelligence and AI‑driven solutions.

Reference

PIB | Digital Threat Report 2025-26