Speaking at the Global CyberPeace Summit 2026, Indian Cybercrime Coordination Centre CEO Rajesh Kumar said that the cyber attacks carried out between 2024 and 2025 have seen a lot of AI adoption and automation.
The advent of artificial intelligence has led to the industrialisation of cybercrime, with a lot of automated attacks being carried out by organised gangs, a top official of the Indian Cybercrime Coordination Centre said on Tuesday.
Speaking at the Global CyberPeace Summit 2026, Indian Cybercrime Coordination Centre CEO Rajesh Kumar said that the cyber attacks carried out between 2024 and 2025 have seen a lot of AI adoption and automation.
Indian Cybercrime Coordination Centre (I4C), set up by the home ministry, is a nodal agency for providing a framework for law enforcement agencies to deal with cybercrime.
“The biggest change that has come is that now cybercrime is being committed on an industrial scale. The technology has enabled industrialisation of cybercrime. With industrialisation, I mean the organised criminal gangs, mostly operating from Southeast Asia, Africa, the Middle East and maybe within parts of our country as well. They have bureaucratic structures with specialised wings,” Kumar said.
He said that the organised gangs have a human resource, which recruits, takes care of their promotion and remunerations.
“They will have the research and development wing which identifies what are the weaknesses which can be exploited, and how to exploit. They exploit technology, the weaknesses in the technological systems that we adopt, and they also identify the weakness in the human psyche,” he said.
He said that several attacks were in the form of a social engineering attack, but they were aided by AI.
“Globally, it is estimated that the cost of cybercrime for the year 2025 was around USD 10.8 trillion. This is the cost of cybercrime. It is expected to grow to around USD 12 trillion this year,” he said.
Kumar said that state-backed actors are using criminal infrastructure to further their geopolitical objectives.
According to several global think tanks, 80 per cent of cyber attacks are now AI driven, he said.
“Those of you who have received SMSs that your chalan is sending, it was being sent, created, personalised and sent by an AI. AI is auto scripting, it is drafting, and it is executing. The messages that you are getting, whether it is in the form of an SMS or whether it is a WhatsApp communication, it is hyper personalised. So, you are made to believe,” Kumar said
Even in the cases of digital arrest, AI is being used to show the face of a famous police officer to make one believe that the person on the other side is an actual police officer, he said.
Kumar said that a new modus operandi has come into light of a triple extortion model, where the criminal would install ransomware, encrypt data and then threaten to leak the data.
“Another very disturbing trend now that we are seeing is crime as a service. Now gangs are there, which are offering crime as a service. That means you want to commit a crime, but you do not know how to go about it. Hire somebody else to do the crime,” he said, and shared a number of cybercrimes, which sometimes con senior government officers.
Ranjana Jha, Vice Chancellor of the Indira Gandhi Delhi Technological University for Women (IGDTUW), said that among the many technologies that are driving digital transformation in modern enterprise, artificial intelligence stands apart as the most disruptive and consequential.
“AI-driven human-computer interaction is no longer experimental; it is routine, invisible and pervasive. AI is transforming healthcare, finance, education, justice, creativity at breathtaking speed, yet public trust remains fragile. India needs widespread AI literacy. AI literacy will not only improve the quality of life but will also improve the quality of life,” she said.
