Critical security risks facing India’s critical infrastructure: Protecting essential services with AI-driven security operations

By Ramy Ahmad, Principal Director, Sales Engineering (iMETA), Exabeam 

India’s critical infrastructure is a high-risk and lucrative target for cyberattacks. As cyberthreats become more sophisticated and pervasive, critical infrastructure providers face greater pressure to protect mission-critical data and maintain operational integrity. This is a growing challenge for the country as it embraces further digital transformation.

Threat actors are increasingly capitalising on India’s ever-expanding attack surface, with 2023 seeing a massive 400 million detections across approximately 8.5 million endpoints, according to DSCI. As cyberthreats continue to rise, critical infrastructure sectors face elevated risks. The essential nature of critical infrastructure means that a successful attack could directly impact life-sustaining medical devices, industrial control systems that run power grids, or tools that examine water contamination.

Whether the attack is nation-state sponsored, for-profit, or an insider threat, securing these vital environments demands innovative, artificial intelligence (AI)-powered tools that enable smarter detection, faster investigations, and easier response. 

India’s essential infrastructure under attack

Cyberattacks on critical infrastructure are especially dangerous due to the widespread disruption they could cause to some of the most relied upon services in society. As threat tactics continue to evolve, securing vital industries, from healthcare to utilities and education becomes a more complex challenge for security teams.

More and more, cybercriminals are leveraging AI to launch evasive attacks, including adaptive malware that avoids traditional detection methods. This leads to more attacks slipping through the cracks and ramps up the severity of the risk facing India’s critical sectors.

At the same time, critical infrastructure providers are navigating other factors that expand the threat landscape across the country. These include:

– Rapid digital transformation. The adoption of technologies, such as Internet of Things (IoT), is being implemented across critical industries to enhance operational efficiency, improve safety, and enable predictive maintenance. Whilst this provides new operational benefits, it also introduces new risks if not properly secured. Improper configurations such as default credentials and unpatched vulnerabilities are often abused by threat actors to gain network or device access. 

– The widening cybersecurity skills gap. Globally, an estimated 4 million professionals are needed to fill the growing cybersecurity workforce gap according to ISC2. This is a challenge that directly affects India, causing considerable strain on security teams and their resources. There is a risk that this will cause understaffed teams to lose motivation or overlook potential threats, leading to considerable financial and reputational consequences. 

– Unsecure legacy systems. Operators previously integrated IT systems to help manage the Industrial Control System (ICS) and Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems that monitor and control critical infrastructure. IT and operational technology (OT) legacy systems were not built with security in mind because they were once remote and isolated. As technology has evolved, many of these operating systems have become obsolete, unpatched, and vulnerable. 

Deploying AI-driven security defences 

In an era where cyberthreats are evolving at an unprecedented pace, the importance of strong threat detection, investigation, and response (TDIR) has never been greater for critical infrastructure in India. Effectively protecting against pervasive attacks and AI-based risks requires an intelligent approach that goes beyond traditional security measures. 

As the risk to sensitive data and critical services rises, machine learning (ML) and AI play a vital role in augmenting detection capabilities and processing and analysing large data volumes in real time. Critical infrastructure providers can gain the advantage over threat actors by deploying a cloud-native security information and event management (SIEM) solution combined with sophisticated AI-powered behavioural analytics. 

They benefit from a future-ready security foundation that enables:

– Automated investigations – By deploying a cloud-based SIEM that leverages user and entity behaviour analytics (UEBA), critical infrastructure providers can automate the TDIR workflow to act on alerts more decisively and improve productivity. AI-driven security tools offer automation capabilities, including automated analysis of security incidents based on AI algorithms, enabling analysts to boost security operations centre (SOC) efficiency.

– Real-time visibility – UEBA tools help security teams recognise suspicious activities that may signify a security event in real time. For example, if a user unexpectedly accesses sensitive information, it could indicate a security risk, like an insider threat or a compromised account. By detecting these anomalies and sending out rapid alerts, UEBA tools assist in preventing potential damage from escalating.

– Optimised analyst efficiency – UEBA systems are constantly learning how to be more accurate and avoid false alarms based on analysis of historical data. If the combination of indicators occurred rarely in the past, the risk will get a higher score. This approach reduces false positives because multiple abnormalities must occur before an analyst is alerted. In turn, this enables critical infrastructure providers to focus on genuine threats that require urgent attention.

– Rapid time to value – The right UEBA solution should not require professional services for configuration and deployment. Instead, it should provide built-in use cases without needing everything to be customised from the ground up. Critical infrastructure providers gain an easy-to-deploy solution that can be scaled and extended to new functionality as their security needs evolve.

A threat-ready future for critical infrastructure

Digital transformation is only set to continue to accelerate in India. However, as with all innovation, this opens the doors to new risks as threat actors take advantage of new security vulnerabilities. 

With the threat to critical infrastructure rising, service providers must take proactive measures to accurately detect high-risk, anomalous user and entity activity across all operating environments. Leveraging UEBA enables security teams to take back control over rising cyber risks with an AI-driven approach.