One group claimed ten of India’s sixteen ransomware victims

Between 21 May and 21 August 2026, twelve of those sixteen were suppliers — precision engineering, CNC machining, facility management, staffing, market research — not the companies that depend on them.

That is where the money moves. A supplier stops, and the disruption runs both ways through the chain at once: upstream into its own vendors, downstream into its customers. Nobody involved can size the blast radius while it is happening. One incident in this window carried a reported revenue loss of $18 million, and the firm that lost it is not the firm that was attacked.

The scorecard

Manufacturing and Business Services sit in Elevated, on six and five incidents. Ten of the 23 verticals recorded no observed activity — which means none was seen, not that none occurred.

What the quarter showed

• Ransomware was 59% of everything observed. Sixteen of 27 incidents. Nothing else came close.
• Concentration, not volume. One group took ten of the sixteen; four other groups appear once each. This is not a rising tide. It is one operator working steadily through two verticals.
• Access is sold before it is used. Five listings offered entry rather than loot — desktop access to a senior employee’s machine at an IT corporation, shell access to a telecoms operator, remote access to a technology company, 2.4 million real-estate customer records, and material from an Indian missile programme. That is next quarter’s incident list, on sale now.
• Finance was hit once, for 1.57 TB. Insurance and Credit Union recorded nothing. BFSI is not exempt — it is thinly represented, and its real exposure sits in the verticals above it.
• Education carried the credential losses. Two of its three incidents were breaches: administrator credentials and authentication tokens in one, the member records of a national professional body in the other.
• Fourteen of the 27 fell in July. Read that as leak-site publishing in tranches, not a July surge. A listing date is not an attack date.

Why it reaches your numbers before it reaches the news

None of the sixteen is listed. Several sit in the supply chains of companies that are, and a private supplier’s outage never carries the acquirer’s, the analyst’s or the market’s name on it — until the quarter misses.

Concentration is the multiplier. Ten organisations, one group, two verticals, one window. A buyer single-sourcing across those verticals is not holding ten independent risks.

And the disclosure that follows

Five questions for the board

• Which suppliers could stop your revenue? Not the largest by spend — the ones that, dark for a fortnight, delay shipment, production or client delivery. Manufacturing, Business Services and Engineering carried twelve of the sixteen ransomware incidents.
• What is a two-week outage worth in your numbers? One incident here cost a reported $18 million. If you cannot put a figure against your top ten suppliers, that is the gap.
• Would you learn of it in time to say anything? Most listings never reach the news media. A disclosure you first hear about from a customer is already late.
• Is your single-sourcing concentrated in the verticals above? One group, ten organisations, two verticals.
• Can you evidence supplier security to an analyst, an insurer or an acquirer? Annual questionnaires are not evidence about a supplier compromised last month.

The numbers behind this edition

27 counted incidents across the quarter of 21 May 2026 to 21 August 2026, by category: Ransomware 16 · Underground Activity 5 · Data Breach 4 · APTs 1 · Hacktivism 1. A further 6 items in the source set were global advisories or industry news with no India nexus, and are excluded from every figure on this page.

Download this edition

Generated from the same source this page renders from, so the files and the grid cannot disagree. Aggregate counts only — there are no incident-level records in either file.

• india-threat-scorecard-2026-08.json — the edition, with per-vertical and per-category counts nested.
• india-threat-scorecard-2026-08.csv — one row per vertical, flattened for a spreadsheet.
• schema.json — JSON Schema for an edition, so you can validate against it rather than guess at the shape.

How this is compiled

Each edition counts publicly observable cyber threat activity affecting organisations in India, arranged across the same 23 industry verticals every time. An item is counted when the affected organisation is in India, or when the activity specifically targets India. Global vulnerability advisories, commodity malware listings and industry news are excluded from the counts.

Nothing is counted twice and nothing is weighted. A vertical’s figure is the number of distinct observations recorded against it in the window, and the band follows from that figure by a published rule. The window, the vertical list and the category list are held constant between editions, because a count series is worth nothing if what is being counted moves.

What we do not publish

No organisation is named, described or made identifiable, in any edition, in the page or in the dataset. We publish counts. This is a deliberate limit rather than an editorial preference: victim identities in threat reporting are frequently drawn from secondary sources and are frequently wrong, and we are not willing to put a name behind a claim we cannot verify.

Disclaimer

The India Threat Scorecard reports aggregate counts of publicly observable cyber threat activity affecting organisations in India, across 23 industry verticals.

• Informational only. Nothing here is legal, regulatory, financial or security advice. Reporting obligations turn on facts specific to an entity and an incident.
• No organisation is identified. We publish counts, not victims. Nothing here should be read as a statement about any identifiable organisation.
• Sources and method. Compiled and analysed by BitScore from its threat monitoring of Indian organisations, drawing on commercial cyber threat intelligence, dark-web and leak-site observation, and third-party news reporting. Some source material is processed using AI and large language model techniques. It may therefore contain inaccuracies, including in dates and in the attribution of activity.
• Observations, not confirmed breaches. An entry counts an observation — a claim made by a threat group, a marketplace listing, or a public report. It is not confirmation that a compromise occurred, nor of its scope.
• Not a security rating. The bands measure observed threat activity in a vertical over a period. They do not measure the security posture, control maturity or risk of any organisation in that vertical, and they are unrelated to any security rating.
• Coverage is a sample. What is observable is not everything that happened. A vertical showing no activity means none was observed in the period, not that none occurred.
• Corrections. If you believe something here is wrong, write to ni.ia.erocstib@ttimin and we will check it and correct the record.
• No liability. Provided “as is”. BitScore CyberTech LLP accepts no liability for any loss arising from reliance on it.

The published counts are free to reuse under CC BY 4.0 — use them, and credit bitscore.in.

This edition covers 21 May 2026 to 21 August 2026. Counts are of observations recorded in that window; an observation date is the date activity became visible, which is not the date it began.