Inside India’s banks’ scramble to catch up with AI-powered hackers
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.NEW DELHI/MUMBAI: India’s largest banks are stepping up cyber defences, hiring, and insurance coverage as concerns grow that advanced AI systems could make cyberattacks faster and harder to contain, exposing gaps in preparedness and protection.The pressure has risen after a finance ministry meeting with top banking executives on 23 April focused on banks’ preparedness for AI-linked cyber threats. The meeting came weeks after Anthropic unveiled Claude Mythos, a frontier AI model the company said could identify vulnerabilities and conduct cyberattacks at unprecedented speed.Concerns around AI-enabled attacks have grown since September last year, when a cloud storage server exposed personal banking data of nearly 300,000 individuals, including loan account details linked to several large banks and non-banking finance companies.India’s largest private lender, HDFC Bank, told Mint it reviews cyber insurance annually and is now widening coverage as risks evolve.“The bank is continuously strengthening its cyber security posture, including hiring highly-skilled talent across security engineering, developer security operations, red-teaming or simulation of cyber attacks, and AI security,” said Ramesh Lakshminarayanan, group head of information technology and chief information officer at HDFC Bank.At Axis Bank, teams participate in programmes such as adversarial AI and ‘red teaming’ to simulate attacks.