Financial cost of cyberattacks increasing, threatens national security

Digital attacks target critical infrastructure, prompt calls for more robust regulatory framework

State and non-state actors are targeting India through cyberattacks — one of the most pressing national security threats for the government, according to the Home Ministry’s anti-terrorism policy document called PRAHAAR.

 

According to Group-IB’s Tech Crime Trends Report, India emerged as the primary target for global hacktivist attacks in 2024, accounting for 12.8 per cent of all incidents, followed by Israel (7 per cent), Russia (4 per cent) and Indonesia (3.5 per cent).

 

India recorded 7.9 million cybersecurity incidents between 2019 and 2024, while lodging 5.3 million cybercrime complaints. The financial cost of such crimes has surged. Cyber frauds caused losses of ₹551 crore in 2021. By 2024, such losses increased 295 per cent to ₹12,181 crore.

 

Cybersecurity has become a priority national security concern, said Prime Minister Narendra Modi in February 2022. The threat has become even more worrying since then.

 

Cybersecurity incidents per million internet users surged from 687 in 2019 to 2,304 in 2024, marking a more than threefold increase. Cybercrime complaints per million internet users surged from 45 to 2,295, marking nearly a 50-fold rise, according to data from the Asia Pacific Computer Emergency Response Team. 

 

While India’s data breach losses remain relatively small compared to other major economies, its share of the global total has risen steadily year-on-year. Between 2019 and 2025, the United States’ share of global breach costs increased from 14.29 per cent to 15.36 per cent, while the United Kingdom saw a marginal decline from 6.77 per cent to 6.22 per cent.

 

India’s share slightly increased from 3.19 per cent in 2019 to 3.77 per cent in 2025, meaning that while the absolute burden is low, the financial impact of data breaches is steadily expanding. 

 

Red Echo, a suspected Chinese state-sponsored group, was in October 2020 blamed by security analysts for a malware campaign that led to a two-hour power outage in Mumbai, exposing vulnerabilities in India’s critical infrastructure. Transparent Tribe, an alleged Pakistani group, in August 2025 targeted Indian government entities using malicious files to compromise Windows and Linux systems, signalling an expanding cyberespionage threat.

 

The India Cyber Threat Report 2025, released by the Data Security Council of India and Seqrite, highlights a sharp rise in malware detections based on behavioural analysis. Malware instances in Indian cybersecurity incidents surged from 5 million in 2021 to 53 million in 2024, marking a more than tenfold increase in three years.

 

The report said that malicious detections in 2024 were concentrated within critical economic sectors. Health care accounted for 21 per cent of malware cases, followed by BFSI (19 per cent), hospitality (17 per cent), education (15 per cent), and MSMEs (7 per cent). 

 

“Critical information infrastructure” of government and private sectors relying on industrial control systems (ICS) to manage essential services are prime targets of cyberattacks, said Balraj K Sidhu and Arunender Singh in an article published in the Economic and Political Weekly in September 2021. “It appears the existing regulatory framework in India has not yet taken strong measures to strengthen the ICS security which is the need of the hour as power, transport and energy increase their vulnerability to cyberattacks,” the authors said.

 

As digital threats evolve from individual data breaches to state-sponsored attacks on critical infrastructure, India faces a dual challenge of surging financial losses and a pressing need for a more robust regulatory framework.