NEW DELHI: India is the world’s seventh most targeted country by cyberattacks and third in Asia, a senior Microsoft executive said Friday, warning that artificial intelligence was already helping criminals mount ransomware and espionage campaigns.At the NDTV World Summit 2026, Nicholas Butts, director of AI and cybersecurity policy at Microsoft, said the risks were immediate.“What we’re seeing is not about potential doom and gloom in 10 years but about very real security threats right here today,” he said.Butts cited Storm 3168, also called Jadepuffer, which he described as a China-based ransomware operation using AI agents against customers worldwide.He also pointed to Russian and Chinese state-sponsored actors deploying agents for espionage, including a group Microsoft tracks as Storm 0940.AI was also lowering the barriers for smaller criminal operations, he said.Butts cited EvilTokens, allegedly built by two individuals using AI coding tools, which offered access to criminal infrastructure and affected more than 10,000 organisations across 120 countries. He did not specify how many were Indian.“The threat is very real to India,” Butts said. Microsoft’s assessment draws on its extensive security monitoring, including screening about five billion emails daily, he added.
