OPINION | The Next Big Breach: Why India’s digital boom is a hacker’s dream

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India’s digital revolution is rewriting how the country works. Payments move in seconds, healthcare runs on cloud data, goods are tracked in real time, and governance itself now depends on software. But the faster India connects, the more exposed it becomes.

The ransomware attacks on hospitals, government portals, and utilities are warning shots. Cybersecurity has become the weakest link in the digital economy, and India’s rapid digitisation magnifies that risk.

It is not just India. Around the world, organisations will spend more than $200 billion on cybersecurity this year. Yet breaches keep happening. Criminal gangs and governments like China and North Korea now treat hacking as national strategy. Attackers are moving faster than defenders. The paradox is clear: the more we spend on protection, the less secure critical systems seem to be.

The problem is that most organisations are still fighting the last war. They build firewalls and identity systems that assume a clean divide between “inside” and “outside.” That divide disappeared long ago as we have seen from the Chinese penetration of critical US government systems.

The AIIMS ransomware attack in 2023 proved the point. India’s top medical institution was paralysed for days. Patient data was locked, systems were shut down, and doctors went back to pen and paper. The breach showed how fragile even the most advanced systems have become in a connected world.

The old model of cybersecurity is clearly broken. The smart approach now is to assume breaches will happen and design systems that can take the hit, limit the damage, and keep running.

One company that brings this thinking to life is ColorTokens, a Silicon Valley firm with operations in the United States and Europe and its R&D in India. It has built one of the most practical and forward-looking cybersecurity models I have seen. Because it reflects an approach I have long believed in, global innovation powered by Indian engineering, I admit I am partial to it.

Its founder and CEO, Rajesh Khazanchi, is a veteran of VMware, HP, and Oracle and holds several patents in cloud and security automation. His idea is simple but powerful: if intruders get in, stop them from moving. In other words, lock them in the room they entered.

ColorTokens’ microsegmentation platform divides a company’s digital environment into self-contained zones so that a breach in one cannot spread to another. It constantly maps every connection across a company’s cloud, on-site, and data-centre systems, sets strict access policies, and automatically cuts off suspicious activity before it spreads.

The result is speed and control. Ransomware or malware can be contained in minutes instead of days, allowing hospitals, factories, or banks to stay operational while they clean up the problem.

What makes ColorTokens stand out is the range of what it protects. It shields not only traditional IT systems but also operational technology and Internet of Things devices such as factory machinery, energy grids, medical scanners, and smart buildings. Few cybersecurity companies can protect such a wide range of assets without disrupting daily operations.

The outcome is a single, unified view of everything connected to a network, IT, OT, and IoT alike, and the ability to model and simulate attacks before they happen. It is the digital equivalent of a ship built with watertight compartments: one section may flood, but the vessel stays afloat.

The scale of India’s challenge is staggering. The Indian Computer Emergency Response Team logged more than two million cybersecurity incidents last year, ten times more than five years ago. India now ranks among the top five countries hit by ransomware.

As AI speeds up both attack and defence, the time between the first intrusion and total system failure is shrinking to minutes. It is not hard to imagine a ransomware strike shutting down a major port, a banking network, or a health database, with ripple effects across the economy. The cost, both financial and reputational, would be immense.

India’s policymakers understand the danger. A national cybersecurity plan is being updated to focus on zero-trust design and the protection of critical infrastructure. But businesses cannot rely on government protection. In most organisations, cybersecurity is still treated as a formality or an IT expense, not as a core business risk. Companies act only after a disaster.

A decade ago, most cutting-edge security products were built in Silicon Valley or Israel. Today, Indian engineers are at the centre of many of the best systems for breach containment, threat detection, and zero-trust architecture. ColorTokens is part of that story.

The same momentum can be seen in Indian startups, universities, and the research centres of global technology firms. Together, they form a fast-maturing ecosystem that could make India not just a consumer of cybersecurity but a producer of it.

To protect the trust that drives its digital revolution, India must move from defensive spending to measurable resilience. Breach readiness must be built into every layer of technology, from finance and logistics to health and governance. There can be no excuses.