NEW DELHI: The Indian agencies, while taking a cue and lessons from what had happened during the 2023 G20 Summit, during which massive cyber assaults were reported, have decided to put in place a foolproof cyber-defence architecture ahead of the 18th BRICS Summit in New Delhi, beginning later this month.
According to officials, the cyber-security agencies are geared up to deal with humongous attack volumes that could run into millions of attempts a minute, as the scale of the threat was starkly demonstrated during the G20 Summit.
On the day of the event, the official G20 website faced around 16 lakh attack attempts in a single minute, which came to nearly 26,000 attempts every second.
The traffic was detected and contained through coordinated action by the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C), CERT-In and the National Informatics Centre (NIC), the officials said.
The experience has since driven a broader shift in India’s cyber-security strategy, particularly for high-profile international events. Rather than depending on a single defensive perimeter, agencies are deploying multiple layers of protection, combining traffic filtering, continuous network monitoring, threat intelligence, automated detection and coordinated incident response.
India is hosting the 18th BRICS Summit in New Delhi on September 12-13 as part of its 2026 BRICS Chairmanship. The gathering is expected to bring together leaders and senior officials from member countries, making government websites, communication networks and other digital infrastructure associated with the summit potential targets.
According to the officials looking into the matter, teams have been constituted at both national and local levels. Cyber-security experts and officers will maintain round-the-clock monitoring, backed by a multi-agency, multi-layered response mechanism designed to absorb and neutralise extremely high volumes of malicious traffic.
Security agencies are also alert to threats posed by state-linked actors, including the possibility of coordinated attempts to disrupt the summit and its supporting digital infrastructure.
The challenge is being compounded by the rapid emergence of artificial intelligence-enabled cyberattacks. Automated systems can generate malicious requests at unprecedented scale, making it increasingly difficult for defenders to distinguish genuine users from hostile traffic without disrupting legitimate access.
Noting that the data from this year alone should worry every policymaker, a cyber-security expert said organisations in the country faced an average of more than 3,800 cyberattacks a week through 2025 and into 2026, with automated AI-powered scanning and exploitation emerging as a key driver.
More than a quarter of malicious breaches recorded in India this year were found to be AI-generated, while the average cost of a data breach rose to roughly Rs 26 crore, an increase of nearly 18 percent in a year, he added.
Cyber cooperation is also emerging as a central theme of BRICS priorities. During a BRICS cyber exercise held in New Delhi this year, participating countries tested coordination between cyber-response organisations and financial-sector institutions through a technical cyber drill.
