Key Details
Cyber risk is shifting from isolated attacks on individual institutions towards systemic threats that exploit trusted identities, software ecosystems and interconnected financial infrastructure.
Threat Shift | Key Finding | Why It Matters |
|---|---|---|
Accelerating threat landscape | Six of the seven threats identified in the previous report have already materialised, while exploitation windows have shrunk from weeks to hours. | Financial institutions have far less time to detect and respond to emerging vulnerabilities. |
AI-driven cybercrime | Deepfakes, AI-generated phishing, synthetic identities and adversarial AI are becoming mainstream attack techniques. | AI is making cyberattacks more scalable, convincing and difficult to detect. |
Systemic vulnerabilities | Cloud platforms, APIs, software supply chains, business logic and third-party ecosystems are becoming major attack surfaces. | A compromise in one trusted system can rapidly affect multiple institutions. |
Compliance gap | Security controls often satisfy audits but fail under real-world adversarial conditions. | Cyber resilience increasingly depends on continuous validation rather than periodic certification. |
Response readiness | India’s BFSI sector experiences attacks at 1.6 times the global average, while the average Mean Time to Contain (MTTC) remains 263 days. | Slow detection significantly increases financial and operational risk. |
Cyber Risk Is Becoming Systemic
The Digital Threat Report 2025–26, jointly developed by SISA, CERT-In and CSIRT-Fin, argues that digital transformation has fundamentally changed the nature of cyber risk across the BFSI sector. Artificial intelligence, cloud adoption, real-time payment systems and increasingly interconnected digital ecosystems have dissolved traditional security perimeters, allowing attacks to spread across institutions rather than remaining isolated within individual organisations.
The report notes that India’s BFSI sector experiences cyberattacks at 1.6 times the global average, reported incidents increased from 1.4 million in 2021 to 2.9 million in 2025, and six of the seven threats anticipated in the previous edition have already materialised, highlighting the accelerating pace of cyber risk.
Trust Has Become the New Attack Surface
Rather than relying primarily on malware or network intrusion, attackers increasingly manipulate trusted identities, applications and business processes. Deepfakes, voice cloning, synthetic identities, AI-generated phishing, API abuse, session hijacking and business-logic exploitation enable malicious activity to resemble legitimate operations.
The report groups these risks into three structural clusters. AI and Human Deception undermines identity verification through machine-scale impersonation and social engineering. Software and Systems exposes vulnerabilities in APIs, AI models, business logic and software supply chains. Infrastructure and Economy highlights how ransomware, cloud compromise, third-party platforms and future quantum threats can disrupt financial continuity across multiple institutions.
Compliance No Longer Guarantees Security
A central finding of the report is the widening gap between regulatory compliance and operational resilience. Organisations may successfully complete cyber audits while remaining vulnerable because controls are not continuously tested against evolving attack techniques.
The report argues that financial institutions should shift from a prevention-first approach towards continuous assurance, treating identity as the primary control plane and assuming that compromise is inevitable. The objective is not simply to block attacks but to detect, contain and recover from them before they become systemic incidents.
18-Month Cyber Resilience Roadmap
The report proposes a phased transition towards continuous cyber assurance.
Implementation Phase | Priority Actions |
|---|---|
0–6 months | Deploy phishing-resistant multi-factor authentication for privileged users; govern non-human identities; conduct adversarial business-logic testing for real-time payment systems; strengthen runtime integrity monitoring and automated threat containment. |
6–12 months | Introduce continuous session assurance using behavioural analytics and device posture; expand governance of non-human identities; establish behavioural transaction baselines; strengthen cloud posture management and micro-segmentation. |
12–18 months | Deploy passwordless authentication, AI supply-chain integrity controls, blockchain-aware transaction monitoring and complete the transition towards identity-centric access control and continuous assurance. |
What is Continuous Control Monitoring (CCM)?
Continuous Control Monitoring (CCM) is the continuous verification that cybersecurity controls remain effective while systems are operating. Unlike periodic audits, CCM identifies configuration drift, control failures and emerging vulnerabilities in real time.
Policy Relevance
Strengthen supervisory frameworks by requiring continuous session assurance and liveness detection for customer onboarding, privileged access and high-risk financial transactions.
Expand regulatory testing beyond conventional penetration assessments to include AI robustness, business-logic vulnerabilities and software supply-chain assurance.
Accelerate the transition from periodic cyber audits towards Continuous Control Monitoring and runtime attestation across cloud-native financial systems.
Position identity governance—covering both human and non-human identities such as APIs, service accounts and automated applications—as a core pillar of financial-sector cybersecurity.
Strengthen cross-institutional cyber resilience through standardised incident reporting, supply-chain assurance and real-time threat intelligence sharing among CERT-In, CSIRT-Fin, RBI and regulated financial institutions.
Begin preparing financial infrastructure for post-quantum cryptography as long-term cryptographic risks become increasingly relevant.
Follow the Full Report Here: Digital Threat Report 2025-26: For the Banking, Financial Services, and Insurance (BFSI) sector