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CERT-IN warns of ‘significant escalation’ in AI-powered attacks, some after victims tried to improve defences

The Indian Computer Emergency Response Team has identified an escalating campaign targeting cryptocurrency exchanges and fintech firms.

  The Ministry of Road Transport and Highways has directed India's national cybersecurity agency to conduct a forensic security audit of four of its core digital portals, following reports that personal data of vehicle owners was being sold through Telegram bots and mobile applications for as little as ₹5 per lookup. The ministry ordered the Computer Emergency Response Team of India, commonly known as CERT-In, to audit VAHAN, SARATHI, e-Challan, and the Pollution Under Control Certificate portal. These four platforms collectively hold some of the most sensitive civic data in the country, covering vehicle registrations, driving licences, traffic challans, and vehicle fitness records for hundreds of millions of Indians. The trigger for the audit was a report documenting an active Telegram-based service that allowed anyone to query a vehicle registration number and receive the owner's full name, father's name, present and permanent addresses, PIN code, and mobile number. The same service also offered driving licence details, challan history, FASTag information, and downloadable copies of registration certificates and driving licences. A cybersecurity firm, Cyderes, traced the service's backup channel to 21,329 subscribers before it was taken down. It rebuilt itself under new handles within weeks. The scale of commercial access to these government databases is not incidental. As of the latest available figures, 25,314 private corporate entities held active credentials for the four portals, collectively running 1.708 crore searches over a 33-month period. Officials are now reviewing whether daily search limits and usage guidelines were actually enforced during this period or simply existed on paper. The concern does not stop at the portals themselves. On the Unified Logistics Interface Platform, managed by the National Industrial Corridor Development Corporation, some authorized entities reportedly logged more than five million data transactions in a single month. The National Informatics Centre has been directed to audit these access patterns. Under revised protocols, any government body seeking data through this logistics platform will now require explicit authorization from the Transport Secretary, with requesting officers verified through Aadhaar-based digital signature certificates or video-based KYC procedures. The ministry has also written to app store operators, including Google, requesting the removal of applications that surface vehicle owner details without adequate safeguards. Two apps drew particular attention: Vehicle Information App, with roughly 10 million downloads, and VehicleSetu, with about 1 million. The largest vehicle information app on the Play Store reportedly carries over 100 million downloads. MoRTH is also reviewing its data-sharing arrangements with the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology in light of the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023. What makes this episode harder to dismiss as a simple breach is that no government database was hacked in the traditional sense. Investigators found no sign of a backend intrusion. Instead, Cyderes traced the data flow to credentials held by licensed identity verification companies, with lookups routed through authentication tokens on a third-party platform. As recently as August 4, 2026, one such route was still returning full VAHAN records including mobile numbers. This points less to a technical failure and more to systemic gaps in how credential use is monitored and how downstream sharing by licensed entities is controlled. The government's relationship with vehicle data predates this episode by several years. In 2019, Transport Minister Nitin Gadkari told the Rajya Sabha that the government had earned ₹65 crore from selling VAHAN and SARATHI data to 87 private companies and 32 government bodies under a bulk data sharing policy. By February 2021, that revenue figure had grown to over ₹111 crore, with more than 170 recipient entities. Recipients included automakers, insurance firms, and second-hand vehicle dealers. The Internet Freedom Foundation noted at the time, and has reiterated since, that the Motor Vehicles Act contains no provision authorising the commercial transfer of this data to private companies. IFF sent a formal representation to MoRTH, the NIC, and CERT-In on September 23, 2026, asking for the incident to be registered as a cyber incident, for server logs to be preserved, and for a comprehensive forensic audit. It also asked the ministry to publish a register of all entities currently holding access credentials, introduce technical controls to cap and monitor search volumes, and notify affected individuals. The ministry says "controlled private access will continue to support commercial efficiency," language that suggests the government is not planning to end third-party access to these databases altogether. What it has not yet addressed publicly is how it will verify that the access controls now being introduced will hold in practice, given that the previous framework apparently operated without meaningful enforcement for years. India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act places compliance obligations on data fiduciaries starting May 2027, with penalties reaching ₹250 crore for violations. The forensic audit ordered by MoRTH will now determine whether the exposure was a question of technical vulnerability, policy failure, or both.

CERT-In says AI agents under evaluation exceeded their assigned authorization and accessed live Indian systems, while separate attackers used open-source agentic AI tools for financially motivated intrusions.