Trust deficit: How is India strengthening cybersecurity in age of AI-powered threats?

India is heading to build defences to keep pace with attackers who now use artificial intelligence to discover vulnerabilities, craft convincing phishing campaigns, and automate attacks within minutes. The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) has acknowledged that generative AI is reducing the barrier for cybercriminals. In response, it has urged ministries, state governments, and regulators to urgently review their security posture as India strengthens its cyber defence framework against threats that are becoming faster, more sophisticated and harder to detect.

Between June and July 2026, CERT-In, the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team, ran ten customised cybersecurity exercises and drills, with the theme of building resilience against frontier AI-driven cyber threats. Earlier this year, it also released targeted technical guidance, a 'Blueprint for Reducing Exposure and Defending against AI-Assisted Vulnerabilities Exploitation in Digital Infrastructure,' published in May 2026 to help protect digital infrastructure from fast-evolving AI threats.

In April, CERT-In went further, issuing a high-risk advisory concerning frontier AI systems capable of allowing autonomous cyberattacks, including hacking and multi-stage, sophisticated malicious operations. In November 2025, MeitY released AI Governance Guidelines, laying out a framework made to bolster safe, inclusive, and accountable AI adoption across industries, as India still needs dedicated AI legislation.

Three institutions anchor this architecture: the AI Governance Group for high-level coordination, the Technology and Policy Expert Committee for technical standards, and a proposed AI Safety Institute tasked with audits and certification. Crucially, incidents tied to AI are now folded into existing reporting rules; AI-related cybersecurity incidents must be reported to CERT-In within six hours where applicable.

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Experts weigh in

Discussing the topic, Srinivasa Sundar Bandepalli, Practice Head, Cards & Payments at Expleo, told WION, "AI agents are acting beyond the scope of their authorisation, raising new cybersecurity concerns worldwide. In payments, where transactions happen in real time, compromised AI decisions can quickly translate into fraud and loss of customer trust. While robust infrastructure and smarter threat detection matter, they're only part of the answer. As AI systems are vulnerable to threats such as prompt injection and data poisoning, AI Assurance must sit at the heart of a multi-layered defence, built in from design through deployment and operations. India is taking important steps to strengthen its defences with CERT-In guidelines, RBI's digital payment security controls, zero-trust security principles, and cyber skills. As organisations increasingly turn to AI to fight AI-powered threats, we must remember that technology cannot be left to guard itself. Human oversight, stronger guardrails, and continuous AI assurance are needed to make advanced technology trusted and secure so that innovation can create value for the people and businesses."

Rahail Ali, Enterprise Head, End Compute & Infra Business, Ample, said, "Cybersecurity Awareness Month asks whether employees recognise cyber risks. Resilience asks a more practical question: if an incident disrupts the business, how quickly can critical operations recover?Most enterprises can assess awareness. Fewer have tested their ability to recover. That is because resilience is built continuously, not in a one-month sprint. It is built into how the IT lifecycle runs. Every device provisioned, every access granted, every system refreshed, and every endpoint retired is a security decision, whether or not anyone calls it one. When one accountable partner owns those decisions across identity, endpoint, network, cloud, and response, protection keeps pace with the business instead of interrupting it. That is what year-round resilience looks like in practice: security that lets business flow, not security that stops it to check."

Similarly, Debraj Dam, Chief of Supertron VAD, said, "India is strengthening its cybersecurity through better sharing of threat information, closer coordination with industry and greater use of AI to detect suspicious activity. These efforts need to translate into how businesses manage their systems every day. AI allows attackers to find and exploit weaknesses faster. An outdated server, an unsecured device or an account with unnecessary access can leave an entire business exposed. Organisations need to be disciplined about updating systems, reviewing access and helping employees recognise suspicious requests. They should also have clear answers to some practical questions: who takes charge during an incident, how it is contained and how quickly operations can resume. As businesses adopt new technology, these decisions need to be made at the planning stage. India’s digital growth depends on people trusting the services they use, and businesses being prepared to protect that trust when something goes wrong."

On the rising concern over deepfakes and synthetic fraud, experts also caution that India’s own defensive AI capability still trails global leaders, leaving the country reliant on foreign technology even as it tries to build indigenous detection and governance systems, a gap that will likely shape how effectively these new rules and drills translate into real-world resilience.