India's Cybersecurity Threat Landscape: What We're Seeing in 2026

Across our client engagements this year, a few clear patterns have emerged. Business email compromise attempts targeting finance teams have grown more sophisticated, often referencing real vendor names and invoice formats scraped from earlier breaches or public information.

Ransomware groups increasingly favor double extortion — encrypting data while simultaneously threatening to leak a stolen copy regardless of ransom payment, changing incident response calculus significantly.

On the regulatory side, the DPDP Act's rollout has pushed many SMBs to formalize data practices for the first time, often surfacing shadow IT and unmanaged data flows they didn't know existed.

We're also seeing increased client interest in AI governance, as organizations deploy LLM-based tools internally faster than existing security review processes can keep pace with.

Supply chain and vendor-originated attacks continue rising as a proportion of overall incidents, reflecting attackers increasingly targeting the weakest link in a trusted chain rather than a hardened primary target.

Cloud misconfiguration remains a stubbornly persistent root cause despite years of industry-wide awareness — organizations continue moving to the cloud faster than they build the internal expertise to configure it securely.

If there's one unifying theme, it's that attackers increasingly exploit organizational and process gaps — unclear ownership, incomplete visibility — rather than purely technical vulnerabilities.\n\nWe're also observing a notable uptick in attacks specifically targeting smaller vendors and suppliers who serve larger, better-defended organizations — attackers rationally focusing effort where defenses are weaker but the eventual payoff (access to a larger target's data or systems) remains high. This reinforces why vendor risk management, discussed elsewhere in our recent work, deserves genuinely elevated priority rather than treatment as a compliance formality.\n\nOn a more positive note, we're also seeing more organizations proactively reaching out for security assessments before an incident forces the conversation, rather than only after something goes wrong — a meaningful shift in posture that we hope continues, since the cost and disruption of proactive assessment is a fraction of reactive incident response.\n\nWe expect these trends to continue evolving rather than reversing in the near term, which reinforces our general advice to clients: build security programs around adaptable principles — strong identity controls, tested incident response, disciplined vendor management — rather than narrowly optimizing defenses against today's specific attack techniques alone, since those techniques will keep shifting.\n\nWe'll continue sharing observations like these periodically as patterns shift, since staying informed about the current threat landscape — not just the timeless fundamentals — genuinely helps security teams prioritize limited time and budget toward the risks most likely to actually materialize against organizations like yours.\n\nFor businesses trying to translate these broader trends into concrete action, we generally recommend starting with an honest internal assessment: which of these patterns realistically applies most to your specific business model and data profile, and are your current defenses genuinely calibrated toward those specific risks, or toward a more generic, one-size-fits-all security posture that may not match where your actual exposure sits.\n\nWe'd also note that threat intelligence, to be genuinely useful, needs to be actionable at your specific organizational scale — a global threat report full of nation-state activity relevant primarily to critical infrastructure operators provides limited direct value to a mid-sized business whose realistic threat model looks quite different. Seeking out threat intelligence sources and advisories specifically calibrated to your industry and size tends to produce far more practically useful guidance than consuming only broad, generic industry threat reports.\n\nWe'd add one further observation: the gap between well-resourced enterprises and SMBs in actual security capability appears to be widening, even as attackers increasingly target smaller organizations specifically because that gap makes them easier targets. This makes the case for practical, right-sized security investment — not enterprise-grade tooling SMBs can't realistically operate, but genuinely effective fundamentals matched to actual organizational capacity — more important than ever, since "we're too small to be a target" has become a demonstrably outdated assumption across nearly every industry we work with.\n\nAs we look toward the remainder of the year, we're watching closely how regulatory enforcement actually plays out in practice — whether the Data Protection Board takes visible action on early DPDP Act cases, and how that shapes broader compliance urgency across the market. Regulatory frameworks often see a meaningful shift in genuine organizational priority only after the first few visible enforcement actions make the abstract risk concrete, and we expect that dynamic to play out over the coming months as India's data protection regime matures from a legislative framework into an actively enforced one.