Every October, the global security community observes Cybersecurity Awareness Month, a time for enterprises, Governments and individuals to reflect on basic cyber hygiene and the evolving threat landscape. In 2025, the message is straightforward – simple, repeatable actions matter, but they aren’t enough alone.  As cybercriminals weaponise AI and ransomware becomes more sophisticated, organisations in Indiamust pair awareness with genuine cyber resilience that protects identities and data.

AI & Ransomware: India in The Crosshairs

Attackers are now using AI to automate phishing, reconnaissance, and ransomware deployment, making old attack methods faster and more devastating. This has pushed India to the top of global attack charts, with 12.4 per cent of endpoints impacted by malware in 2024.

Recent studies confirm India remains one of the most heavily targeted regions for ransomware and endpoint attacks. After an incident, many organisations face hard trade-offs: Rubrik Zero Labs report found 80 per cent of Indian enterprises hit by ransomware ended up paying attackers and 44 per cent saw their backups compromised. 

These figures underscore a critical reality: prevention alone is no longer enough. Indian organisations, across both public and private sectors, must now assume breach is inevitable and plan for the rapid recovery of both data and the identities that control it.

Without robust resilience, recovery plans remain fragile, leaving organisations vulnerable to repeat attacks and prolonged disruption.

Identity: Primary Battlefield and Overlooked Asset

Today’s attackers frequently target identities — both human and non-human identities (NHIs) — because accessing identity is often the fastest route to critical systems and data. Identity compromise allows lateral movement, sabotage of backups, and long — dwell access that outlives a single intrusion. 

For Indian organisations, which often run hybrid environments with multiple identity providers (on-premises Active Directory, cloud identity providers [IdPs], SaaS accounts, and NHIs like service principals), this complexity creates numerous failure points that attackers can exploit.

Protecting and recovering identity systems must be central to any resilience strategy. Besides focus on prevention, ensuring rapid recovery of both data and identity systems, the two assets’ attackers most often exploit, is the key. Cyber warfare poses a serious challenge that undermines our top organisational and nationwide data security.

The time has come to assume breach and build “Minimum Viable Business” models that can be rolled rapidly in case of cyberattack scenarios. 

Organisations need to build robust cyber resilience capabilities with its AI, Machine learning and cyber security technologies.

Awareness Month Should Evolve From “Teach” To “Operationalise”

“Cybersecurity Awareness Month” rightly emphasises behaviours, good passwords, multi-factor authentication (MFA) and safe browsing habits.  But for organisations, October should also be the time to operationalise lessons into concrete resilience programs – testable backups, identity visibility, disaster recovery playbooks and tabletop exercises – that include identity compromise scenarios. That operationalisation is where organisations convert awareness into survivability.

Cyber Playbook for Indian Organisations

Treat identity like data: Inventory IdPs, human and NHIs and map their access to critical systems.

• l Test recovery: Perform regular, realistic drills that assume an identity compromise and verify that recovery steps restore access without introducing further risk.
• l Combine prevention with recoverability: Invest in tools and runbooks that make recovery fast and reliable, not just detection-focused.
• l Measure resilience: Track Recovery Time Objectives (RTO), Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) and the ability to restore clean identities and clean data.
• Engage leadership: Present scenario-driven business-impact cases to boards and executives to secure funding for resilience investments.

Proactive Preparedness for Cyber Attacks

Cybersecurity Awareness Month remains a crucial moment to re-educate staff and refresh practices. But as AI accelerates attacker capabilities and ransomware continues to inflict heavy costs, organisations in India need to shift a portion of their investment and energy from “how to stop an attack” to “how to survive and recover.” 

Platforms that zunify identity and data recovery and that allow organisations to manage and rollback AI actions, will be essential ingredients in that shift.