India’s digital economy is booming. However, Seqrite’s India Cyber Threat Report 2026 shows that this growth comes with a steep security cost. Between October 2024 and September 2025, India recorded 265.52 million cyber threat detections across more than 8 million monitored endpoints, averaging over 7.27 lakh detections per day and 505 every minute. For businesses, governments, and individual users, this data is clear. Cyber risk is now a constant background condition, not a rare crisis.
A threat landscape at record intensity
The report confirms that India is under the highest cyber‑attack pressure in its history. Malware still forms the backbone of most campaigns. Trojans and file infectors dominate, with about 88.4 million Trojan detections and 71.1 million file infector detections, together accounting for nearly 70% of all observed attacks. These are often delivered through familiar channels such as malicious email attachments, infected downloads and compromised websites, which means that even basic user actions can trigger a major incident.
At the same time, the character of attacks is evolving from simple “spray and pray” malware to more complex operations. Next‑generation antivirus and anti‑ransomware systems logged over 34 million anomalous activities, including a surge in ransomware, cryptojacking and stealthy lateral‑movement behaviour inside networks. Attackers ran more than 9.2 million scans and exploit attempts against popular software stacks such as WordPress plugins, Apache Tomcat and SysAid, clearly signalling that unpatched and misconfigured systems are prime targets.
Where the damage is concentrated
The geographical spread of attacks in the report reveals clear hot spots rather than a uniform national pattern. Maharashtra led the table with around 36.1 million detections, followed by Gujarat at 24.1 million and Delhi at 15.4 million, while Mumbai, New Delhi and Kolkata emerged as the most targeted cities. These locations host dense clusters of enterprises, government offices and service providers, which gives attackers both scale and diversity in potential victims.
From a sector perspective, education, healthcare and manufacturing together account for nearly 47% of all detections. Educational institutions manage huge volumes of personal data and often rely on legacy infrastructure; hospitals and healthcare providers cannot easily tolerate downtime; manufacturers run complex operational technology that is hard to patch—all conditions that attackers actively exploit. For leaders in these sectors, the report is less a set of statistics and more a direct risk briefing.
The real‑world impact on organisations
Behind these numbers are disruptions to real organisations: encrypted servers, halted production lines, delayed medical procedures and stolen customer data. Ransomware in particular remains a top concern, with activity peaking in early 2025 and showing that criminal groups are willing to paralyse critical systems to demand payment. Even when ransoms are not paid, the cost of forensic investigations, recovery, regulatory scrutiny and reputational damage can far exceed the immediate financial demand.
The report also points to persistent gaps in cyber hygiene as a core reason attacks succeed. Many organisations still run unpatched software, expose poorly secured remote access services, reuse weak passwords or lack multi‑factor authentication on critical accounts. Human factors matter just as much: employees who are not trained to recognise phishing and social‑engineering tactics often become the initial entry point into otherwise well‑protected environments.
How Seqrite says India should respond
Seqrite’s guidance revolves around building resilience rather than relying on any single tool or policy. The report recommends a layered defence that combines strong endpoint protection, email and web filtering, network security, identity and access management and multi‑factor authentication for privileged and remote access. Organisations are encouraged to maintain up‑to‑date asset inventories, automate patch management wherever possible and regularly test backups and disaster‑recovery plans so that they can restore systems quickly without paying ransoms.
To support this, Seqrite has introduced services like Ransomware Recovery as a Service (RRaaS) and Digital Risk Protection Services (DRPS). RRaaS aims to turn chaotic post‑attack recovery into a structured, expert‑led process that focuses on restoration instead of ransom negotiation, while DRPS monitors for brand impersonation, fake domains and other external risks across the open, deep and dark web. For Indian organisations accelerating their digital transformation, combining such specialised services with disciplined internal practices—security awareness, governance and periodic risk reviews—offers the strongest defence against a threat environment that is growing faster, smarter and more relentless each year.
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