The headlines came thick and fast in 2024: cyberattacks weren’t merely impacting IT firms or financial giants. They were everywhere. A government hospital in Ahmedabad saw its patient database encrypted overnight. A hotel chain in Jaipur reported a ransomware hit in the midst of peak wedding season. A local manufacturer in Surat woke up to find his accounts siphoned and systems locked.
The same year witnessed over 369 million security incidents across 8.44 million endpoints in India, with an astonishing 702 threats every minute. Of these, 62% resulted from cloud environments, with ransomware being responsible for more than a million breaches. Most crucially, the victims came from diverse sectors of the economy: healthcare bore the brunt with 22% attacks, followed closely by hospitality (20%), banking and financial services (17%).
But this narrative took a darker turn in India’s Tier‑II cities. Places like Surat, Jaipur, and Ahmedabad were also affected where half of India’s prominent organisations operate. In these cities, as defences are lean, the surge in attacks was sharper and the damage deeper. In wake of this intensifying storm, a critical question arises: can human vigilance alone hold the line? Or, in an era pacing like code, can AI step in to assist, foresee, avoid, and perhaps outthink these attacks?
Two Perspectives, One Cyber Defence
Human beings are masters of decoding context. They can distinguish emotional cues in phishing emails and determine when something ‘feels not quite right’. But we too can make errors. Fatigue, cognitive overload, and social engineering frequently make us vulnerable. IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach Report 2024 notes that 22% breaches stem from human error, misconfigured systems, mishandled credentials, or clicking malicious links. Conversely, AI doesn’t get tired. It can analyse millions of data sets, match threat signatures, and recognise anomalies faster than any human team. Nevertheless, it lacks a sole ingredient: intuition. In light of this, the upsurge of new-age AI tools marks an important shift in cybersecurity, where instinct is not restricted to humans but is in effect mirrored by smart systems.
The Growth of Human-like AI Tools
The new frontier of cybersecurity is human-inspired learning. With advancements in AI and neural-symbolic systems, machines are starting to mimic the decision-making frameworks humans use in real-time threat analysis. These systems can perceive ambiguous problems and create solutions by learning as per context.
Yet, the bigger question is no longer whether AI can detect cyberattacks, but if it can anticipate unexpected threats. This is where human-like learning becomes indispensable. Human cognition pairs memory, perception with prediction. In the same manner, modern AI tools can utilise self-supervised learning models that follow these principles. Instead of depending on huge labelled datasets, these models can assess patterns, detect anomalies, and enhance their understanding of what comprises ‘normal’ across users, applications, and networks. By incorporating natural language processing, AI can further infer the tone, style of phishing emails and detect incidents of urgency, manipulation, or even impersonation.
Road Ahead for Building AI-Ready Ecosystems
India is home to more than 1.2 billion mobile phone users, and is pushing to magnify its digital footprint. Consequently, it has become the need of the hour to tap into AI-driven technologies to prevent and control cyberattacks. Shockingly, the nation lost more than INR 11,300 crore in cybercrimes in the first nine months of 2024, as noted by the Central government’s Indian Cybercrime Coordination Centre (I4C). To counter this, it is imperative that we invest in AI-led public safety systems.
Several Indian companies are also building innovative AI solutions capable of threat detection at a larger scale which can be tailored to the country’s digital ecosystem. Furthermore, there is an urgent need to enhance AI-led awareness platforms that inform citizens about scams, phishing tactics, and fraud detection. These tools can be instrumental in averting cyberattacks, besides developing a deeper understanding about how to leverage these new-age technologies safely and responsibly.
In a nutshell, AI can recognise cyberattacks just like humans do. Indeed, it can do it faster and at a larger scale. But this does not imply that the role of humans has become obsolete. Remarkably, these innovations make us equal partners: AI can take care of the speed, whereas humans can drive strategy. Ultimately, it is about minds and machines running in parallel to build a safer digital world.