Digital Threat Report 2025-26

The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), along with CERT‑In, CSIRT‑Fin, and SISA, releases the 2nd edition of the Digital Threat Report 2025‑26. The report provides a threat overview for India’s banking, insurance, and digital payments ecosystems, highlighting AI asymmetry and emerging cyber trends affecting BFSI and payments.

Digital Threat Report 2025-26 (2nd Edition):

Dimension	Key Details
Release authorities	The 2nd edition is released by MeitY, CERT‑In, CSIRT‑Fin, and SISA.
Coverage sectors	The report covers threats affecting banking, insurance, and digital payments, including India’s BFSI and payments ecosystems.
Threat evolution	Six of seven predictions from last year’s report have already materialised, and the gap between threat emergence and exploitation shrinks from years to months or weeks.
Established attack methods	Attack methods now mainstream comprise social engineering, credential theft, supply‑chain compromise, and cloud exploitation.
Nature of attacks	Breaches often appear as legitimate sessions, approved payments, manipulated workflows, or ordinary user behaviour, making detection harder.
Cyber resilience risk	India’s financial system is highly connected, so one breach can spread across markets and economies.
Risk management approach	The report calls for ongoing risk checks, real‑time responses, and information sharing instead of occasional audits.
AI asymmetry	Low‑resource attackers can use AI to perform activities at machine speed, outpacing defensive and regulatory mechanisms.
Cyber failure framework	The report introduces a 4‑Layer Gap Archetype Framework to analyse how modern breaches escalate, and it states that major cyber failure is caused by a chain of small gaps.
Roadmap timeline	The report sets an 18‑month plan to guide financial institutions from basic security controls to continuous, resilient security systems.
CERT-In status and legal basis	Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT‑In) is the national nodal agency under the IT Amendment Act 2008 for responding to computer security incidents.
CSIRT-Fin role	CSIRT‑Fin is a nodal sectoral CSIRT for India’s financial sector that provides incident prevention, response, and security quality management services.
SISA profile	SISA is a global cybersecurity leader for the payments ecosystem that secures 1,000+ organisations across 40+ countries using breach intelligence and AI‑driven solutions.