Article
AI is rewriting the Indian BFSI threat map
CERT-In's latest report highlights how artificial intelligence is accelerating cyberattacks on India's banking and financial sector.
17 Jul 20261 min readAI4U Desk
Cyberattacks on India's banks more than doubled from 1.4 million in 2021 to 2.9 million in 2025, according to CERT-In's Digital Threat Report 2025-26. MeitY's report flags AI asymmetry as a growing threat to the BFSI sector, noting that hackers are utilizing artificial intelligence to launch multi-vector attacks simultaneously against banks, cloud systems, and vendors.
This threat was underscored in November 2025, when a Chinese-linked group used Anthropic's Claude to run 90 percent of a global espionage operation targeting 30 firms, including financial institutions. Furthermore, malware has become autonomous. Frontier AI models successfully reproduced over half of 405 historical cyberattacks against blockchain software, representing $550 million in simulated losses.
The core issue is that attack velocity is outpacing bank defenses. Artificial intelligence shrinks discovery-to-exploit timelines to machine speed, while compliance gates still move at human speed. Sequential incident response is structurally unprepared for these parallel, AI-run attacks.
To counter this, CERT-In's report prescribes three operational fixes that India's banks and fintechs must adopt, emphasizing that defenders need AI-speed operations rather than static defenses.
