Prelims: Current events of national and international importance | Science & Technology | Cybersecurity
Why in News?
Recently, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), along with CERT‑In, CSIRT‑Fin, and SISA, released the 2nd 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
