The Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) highlighted AI asymmetry as a major threat to the banking, financial services, and insurance (BFSI) sector in its Digital Threat Report 2025-26. The report revealed that India’s BFSI sector faced 2.9 million cyberattacks in 2025, more than double the 1.4 million attacks recorded in 2021, underscoring the growing scale of AI-driven cyber threats, according to medianama.com.
The report detailed two significant AI-enabled cyber incidents over the past year. In November 2025, a Chinese-linked cybercriminal group used Anthropic’s Claude AI tool to target 30 companies worldwide, with AI executing up to 90% of the operation, marking the first large-scale cyberespionage campaign largely run by AI. In April 2026, Claude Mythos Preview autonomously identified over 23,000 vulnerabilities in more than 1,000 open-source projects, including 1,752 classified as high or critical severity, the report stated on medianama.com.
CERT-In’s findings emphasize how AI is transforming cyberattacks from manual, specialist efforts into automated, repeatable attack pipelines. This shift industrializes vulnerability discovery, exploit chaining, and payload delivery, outpacing existing regulatory and defensive frameworks. The report also noted that CERT-In issued its first advisory on AI threats in 2023, warning that AI models could generate malicious code and phishing content, highlighting the systemic nature of AI-powered cyber threats in the BFSI ecosystem, per medianama.com.
The Digital Threat Report 2025-26 underscores the urgent need for updated regulatory and operational measures to address AI-driven cyber risks. The BFSI sector’s exposure to cyberattacks doubled in four years, reaching 2.9 million incidents in 2025, reflecting the rapid escalation of AI-enabled threats documented by CERT-In and MeitY, as reported by medianama.com.