Cybercrime in India
- [!] Cybercrime in the country has gone up significantly from 2021, clocking an increase of 24.4 percent in 2022.
Top 3:
Cybercrime category - 2022
- 64.8% - fraud motive
- 5.5% - extortion
- 5.2% - sexual exploitation
- 10,791 cases - Other motive
Fraud motive
Extortion motive
Sexual exploitation motive
- Maharashtra - 447
- UP - 542
- Karnataka - 338
Causing disrepute motive
- UP - 883
- Gujarat - 371
- MP - 251
Personal revenge motive - 857 cases in 2022
Low chargesheet rate
- only 29.6 for overall India
- Delhi - highest rate - 89.3
Challenge
- After the news breaks, most accused (original creators) delete their accounts and then we have to write to Meta and other big players and wait for their response.
- In most cases, it takes time to trace the IP address. Many others use VPN, which again is a big roadblock. Print
October 2024
Star Health Insurance, one of India's leading health insurers, is allegedly facing a massive data breach
accessed 7.24TB of data related to over 31 million customers, and has allegedly listed the data for sale for $150,000.
smaller data sets containing 100,000 customer records are offered for $10,000 each.
stolen data from Star Health includes highly sensitive information such as customers' names, PAN numbers, mobile numbers, email addresses, birthdates, residential addresses, policy numbers, details of pre-existing conditions, health card numbers, and other confidential medical records.
hacker also alleged that Star Health Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) Amarjeet Khanuja "sponsored" the data leak by purportedly selling the information directly to them India Today
October 2019
In October 2019, part of a network in India’s largest civil nuclear facility, the Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant in Tamil Nadu, was breached by overseas hackers.
April 2022
In April 2022, suspected hackers linked to China had targeted seven power grids hubs in northern India. “Two attempts by Chinese hackers were made to target electricity distribution centres near Ladakh, but were not successful.
November 2022
In November 2022, suspected China-backed hackers targeted the servers of AIIMS, India’s foremost health care institution, crippling patients’ services for days.
August 2023
NIA's Specialised Anti-Cyber Terrorism Unit (ACTU), to probe into cyberattacks on India’s critical and sensitive digital infrastructure.
The ACTU, sanctioned by the Home Ministry last year and currently in the process of being finalised, will be given all such cases to investigate the role of terrorists or state actors behind the attacks.
July 2025
Indian Cyber Espionage Group Targets Italian Government
The DoNot APT group has recently conducted a multi-stage cyber espionage campaign targeting the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, according to Trellix's report on july 8th, 2025. The email leveraged diplomatic themes related to defense attaché coordination between Italy and Bangladesh.
DoNot APT, also known as APT-C-35, Mint Tempest, Origami Elephant, SECTOR02 and Viceroy Tiger, has been active since at least 2016.
The group is known for using custom-built Windows malware, including backdoors such as YTY and GEdit, which are often delivered through spear-phishing emails or malicious documents. Infosecurity magazine
