India Independence Day Government Cyberattack

As India prepared to celebrate its 79th Independence Day, the nation faced an unprecedented surge of cyber threats directed at government, defense, and financial sectors. Security intelligence assessments reported over 4,000 cyber incidents in the weeks leading up to the holiday. The campaign involved a mix of state-sponsored Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs), such as APT36 (also known as Transparent Tribe) and SideCopy, along with opportunistic hacktivist groups and cybercriminal actors from across the region. Their activities included the creation of fraudulent websites impersonating official government portals, extensive phishing campaigns, credential harvesting, and social engineering schemes designed to exploit patriotic sentiment and public engagement during the national event.
The surge was further amplified by heightened geopolitical tensions following the Pahalgam terror attack, which adversaries exploited to intensify both targeted and symbolic attacks against Indian infrastructure. Analysts confirmed that adversaries from neighboring countries, particularly Pakistan and China, were heavily engaged, while international hacktivist collectives joined to amplify disruption.
This wave of activity highlighted the dual dimension of modern cyber threats: sophisticated state-aligned operations aimed at strategic data theft and disruption, and widespread opportunistic scams leveraging the Independence Day context to deceive citizens. Authorities and cybersecurity experts stressed the urgent need for robust domain monitoring, stricter credential protection, stronger phishing defenses, and heightened public awareness to safeguard national security and citizen trust during such high-profile occasions.