MeitY releases 2nd Digital Threat Report 2025-26 for India's BFSI sector

📌 Summary:

• MeitY, with CERT-In, CSIRT-Fin and SISA, released the 2nd edition of the Digital Threat Report 2025-26 for the Banking, Financial Services and Insurance (BFSI) and payments ecosystem
• Central finding: six of seven forward-looking threat predictions from last year's edition have already been fully realised — the gap between threat emergence and exploitation has shrunk from years to weeks
• Threats once considered "emerging" — social engineering, credential theft, supply-chain compromise and cloud exploitation — are now established attack methods
• The report flags "AI asymmetry": the most damaging attacks now appear as legitimate sessions, approved payments or ordinary user behaviour, indistinguishable from genuine activity until damage is done
• Purpose: strengthen cyber resilience and digital trust across banking, financial services, insurance and digital payments

🎯 UPSC Relevance: GS3 (Internal Security) — cyber security of critical financial infrastructure, AI-enabled cyber threats.

📝 Prelims Facts:

• CERT-In (Indian Computer Emergency Response Team) is India's nodal cyber agency under MeitY
• CSIRT-Fin is the Computer Security Incident Response Team for the finance sector
• BFSI = Banking, Financial Services and Insurance

🔑 Key Term: AI asymmetry — the imbalance in which attackers exploit AI to launch sophisticated, hard-to-detect attacks faster than defenders can adapt.