Yes, India’s digital economy is no doubt accelerating, but so are the cyber attacks trying to extract their pound of flesh in the process.
In a nutshell, that’s exactly what a new global financial-sector threat analysis from Check Point Exposure Management Research is suggesting, while painting a bleak picture. According to the study, cyber incidents worldwide more than doubled from 864 in 2024 to 1,858 in 2025, with Asia-Pacific emerging as one of the most strategically targeted regions.
India, in particular, is becoming an increasingly huge target for cyber attacks, where DDoS attacks, data breaches and website defacements are rising sharply.
Digital Indian infrastructure, particularly in the financial sector, can’t catch a break from cyber attacks. India ranked second globally for data breach and leak incidents with 31 cases, recorded 31 major DDoS attacks targeting financial and government-linked systems. The report also says that India witnessed 36 defacement incidents – again placing it second worldwide. This is coordinated pressure across multiple attack surfaces.
Also read: Alert! This new USSD scam doesn’t need internet to steal your money, how to stay safe
Security data already suggests the scale of exposure. India experienced over 265 million cyber attacks in 2025 alone, according to Seqrite, with financial services, telecom and government systems among the hardest hit sectors. CERT-In handled more than 29.4 lakh cyber incidents in the same year, underscoring how routine large-scale attacks have become.
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks are increasingly being used as digital protest tools, geopolitical signals and outright financial disruption mechanisms. Banking portals, payment gateways and even government-linked financial systems are being targeted to trigger outages, erode trust and generate public panic.
Website defacement attacks – often dismissed as low-level hacking – are also surging. But in reality, they’re symbolic warfare. Vigilante hackers from both India and Pakistan carried out these defacement attacks during India-Pakistan conflict of May 2025.
When these incidents cluster around geopolitical flashpoints or economic tensions, they look less like isolated cybercrime incidents and more like a part of a broader coordinated campaign.
If traditional cyber attacks were about breaking in, modern ones are about scaling fast. AI-powered phishing campaigns, investment scams and credential harvesting operations are now spreading across multilingual markets like India and Southeast Asia.
Mobile banking trojans and phishing-as-a-service platforms are targeting users across India, Japan and Indonesia simultaneously, leveraging local languages and regional payment habits, suggests the Check Point research. In short, cybercrime is industrialising.
Financial institutions remain the primary target because they combine valuable data, real-time transaction systems and public trust. India’s financial ecosystem is especially attractive because of its scale. Rapid digitisation, massive mobile adoption and uneven cybersecurity maturity across institutions create gaps attackers can exploit. This allows hacktivists, ransomware groups and organised fraud networks to overlap, blurring the line between cybercrime and cyber conflict.
The uncomfortable truth is that India’s digital growth has made it a global cyber hotspot. And increasingly institutions must now focus on identity governance, mobile threat defence, real-time fraud detection and unified exposure management that links threat intelligence with automated remediation.
Also read: Indians get 13 scam messages daily, AI and deepfake boosting scams
