According to Cisco's latest 'Relentless Defense Report', 96% of organisations in India suffered a material, business-disrupting cyber incident over the past 12 months, with more than one in three involving artificial intelligence (AI)-enhanced attacks. The report, based on a double-blind survey of 8,000 security professionals across 30 markets, including 1,000 respondents from India, evaluated organisations on how completely they protect their environments, detection speed, and operational bottlenecks. Despite the high incident rate, more than nine in ten practitioners in India acknowledged detection and response efficiency gains of at least 25% through AI, while nearly one in three said it significantly reduced operational burdens. However, comprehensive AI deployment remains cautious, with four in ten Indian organisations having extensively deployed AI agents in security operations. As per Cisco's Sunil Potti, 'Democratising AI – enabling every person and organisation to harness its potential – demands that we build trust into its foundation. That trust is only realised when security and resilience become inseparable'.
The report identified internal organisational friction as a greater impediment to strengthening cyber defences than technological limitations. In India, only 40% of respondents stated that their security, networking and IT teams function as a cohesive unit with shared tooling and visibility. Communication gaps with executive leadership were prominent, with nearly half (49%) of Indian respondents saying the metrics they measure are too technical to persuade company executives, while 34% struggled to translate business metrics into actionable decision-making information. Additionally, 26% reported having no consistent framework to evaluate security performance. Data access constraints further impeded defence capabilities, with 44% of Indian organisations spending more time collecting and correlating data across systems than countering actual threats and 43% reporting that critical insights were missed due to unreachable data silos. The findings highlight that operational silos represent a critical vulnerability, with fragmented data and disconnected teams emerging as key barriers to stronger cyber defences.
According to Mastercard's latest cybersecurity report titled 'Resilience at Machine Speed', the average cost to independently reproduce a working exploit has fallen to $2.77, representing a significant reduction from previous estimates. The report found that AI systems' success rate on apprentice-level cyber tasks jumped from 9% to 50% between 2023 and 2025. This dramatic improvement demonstrates how AI has fundamentally lowered the barriers to launching cyberattacks, making sophisticated attacks more accessible to malicious actors. The report highlights that 'frontier models today are almost 90 times faster in identifying the zero-day vulnerabilities as compared to last day and age models', demonstrating the accelerated pace of cyberattack development capabilities.
India recorded an average score of 66 out of 100 in the report's evaluation, marginally above the global average of 64. However, only 8% of organisations in India qualified for the best-performing category, matching the global figure of 8%. These top-tier defenders combined broad coverage, rapid response times and unified team operations. Among entities that increased security spending, these top performers were nearly twice as likely to see incidents fall. The report emphasizes that business systems and customers' personal and financial information make up over half of all assets attacked, with RBI-reported bank fraud crossing ₹360 billion in FY2025 and cyber fraud losses reported to the Ministry of Home Affairs exceeding ₹190 billion.
The report addresses emerging risks from AI agents, software that can act and transact on a user's behalf. Companies such as Visa, Mastercard, Google, and in India, NPCI (National Payments Corporation of India) are defining protocols or rule-based guardrails for agents and their verification. Despite benefits, comprehensive AI deployment faces concerns surrounding data exposure, system compromises and third-party management. According to Cisco's Sunil Potti, 'You cannot govern what you cannot see, and you cannot trust what you cannot govern. This unified approach to AI trust is the only way for organisations and consumers to fully embrace the promise of this technology'. The report documents cases where 80-90% of multi-country cyber espionage campaigns ran without a human directing each step, demonstrating the autonomous capabilities of AI-powered cyber threats.
