India's Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) and CERT-In have identified AI asymmetry as a critical cybersecurity risk in the Banking, Financial Services and Insurance (BFSI) sector, where AI-enabled attacks have doubled cyber incidents since 2021.
- BFSI cyberattacks more than doubled to 2.9 million in 2025
- AI enables coordinated multi-vector and rapid exploitation attacks
- Urgent need for automated defenses and zero-trust frameworks
What happened
The Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) released the Digital Threat Report 2025-26, underscoring the growing threat posed by AI-powered cyberattacks within the country's BFSI sector. The number of cyberattacks on banking and financial institutions surged to 2.9 million in 2025, more than doubling from 1.4 million documented in 2021. The report specifically highlights how sophisticated AI tools allow malicious actors to execute simultaneous attacks on internal networks, cloud services, employee accounts, and third-party vendors, overwhelming conventional security responses.
CERT-In also noted a significant reduction in the time between the discovery of vulnerabilities and their exploitation, facilitated by AI's capability to identify and weaponize flaws at machine speed. Additionally, attackers are increasingly targeting the software development lifecycle, especially DevOps systems, to compromise software integrity indirectly rather than attacking individual applications directly. These emerging AI-driven tactics represent a fundamental shift in the cybersecurity landscape for BFSI firms in India.
Why it matters
The report signals an urgent warning for India's BFSI sector that existing defensive and regulatory measures are lagging behind the rapid offensive progression enabled by AI technologies. Traditional incident response frameworks, which assume sequential, manual attack methods, are proving inadequate against highly automated, multi-pronged campaigns that exploit simultaneous vulnerabilities across multiple vectors.
What to watch next
CERT-In and MeitY recommend several strategic measures for BFSI entities to enhance cybersecurity posture, including implementing real-time asset inventory tracking, eliminating hardcoded secrets in software, integrating automated security checks into development pipelines, and accelerating patch deployment using virtual patching methods. Banks and financial firms must move from infrequent vulnerability assessments to continuous monitoring and automated flaw detection as a baseline security practice.
A critical step emphasized in the report is adopting a zero-trust security model, requiring continuous verification of all users and devices within the network to prevent unauthorized internal access, as AI agents have been found exploiting valid credentials to bypass perimeter defenses. Moving forward, organizations should focus on advanced anomaly detection technologies capable of identifying novel, AI-generated attack patterns, ensuring preparedness against threats lacking existing signatures.