Cyber security, media & money-laundering

Falsehoods now travel faster than corrections: in India, rumours on messaging apps have triggered lynchings, riots and panic within hours.

Threat to internal security and public order

• Public order: child-lifting rumours have led to mob lynchings; doctored videos incite communal violence; false alerts trigger panic buying and vaccine hesitancy.
• Internal security: hostile states and terror groups run propaganda and radicalisation campaigns, most intensely during conflicts; deepfakes impersonate leaders and officials.
• Institutions: election misinformation and manufactured distrust in agencies, media and courts erode the legitimacy on which order rests.

Amendments to the IT Rules, 2021

• 2022: Grievance Appellate Committees to hear users' appeals against platform decisions, and stronger due-diligence duties on intermediaries.
• 2023: rules for online gaming and a government Fact Check Unit to flag false content about the Union government; the Bombay High Court struck the unit down in 2024.
• 2025: takedown notices under Rule 3(1)(d) only from officers of Joint Secretary or DIG rank, stating the legal basis, with monthly review at Secretary level.
• 2026: 'synthetically generated information' defined; mandatory labels and traceable metadata for AI-generated content; unlawful content to be removed within three hours of a court order or reasoned government intimation.

Countering disinformation needs law, fast fact-checking, platform accountability and media literacy, without chilling the free speech Article 19 protects.

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Terror groups need money for recruitment, weapons and propaganda; choking that money is as important as neutralising cadres.

Counterfeit currency and money laundering

• Counterfeit currency: high-quality fake Indian currency notes printed abroad and pushed through porous borders finance terror while eroding trust in the currency.
• Money laundering: hawala transfers, cash smuggling, misuse of charities and NGOs, shell companies, trade-based laundering, narco-terror networks and, increasingly, crypto-assets.
• India's response: UAPA and PMLA, NIA's terror-funding cell, the FICN coordination group, FIU-India's financial intelligence and cooperation with neighbours.

International action

• The UN Convention for the Suppression of the Financing of Terrorism (1999); UNSC Resolutions 1373 (2001) and 2462 (2019), which oblige states to criminalise and prevent terror finance; the Egmont Group of financial intelligence units; the 'No Money for Terror' ministerial conference hosted in Delhi in 2022.

FATF's role

• Set up in 1989, FATF sets the global standard through its 40 Recommendations, assesses countries through peer mutual evaluations, and uses its grey and black lists to press non-compliant states, Pakistan being the prominent example.

Methods of compliance by member states

• Prevention: national risk assessments; criminalising terror financing as a standalone offence; beneficial-ownership transparency; KYC, record-keeping and suspicious transaction reports by banks and other reporting entities; regulation of virtual asset service providers.
• Enforcement: targeted financial sanctions that freeze designated persons' assets without delay; supervision of non-profits vulnerable to abuse; cross-border cooperation and extradition.
• India: the 2024 mutual evaluation placed it in 'regular follow-up', a category shared with only four other G20 countries; faster prosecutions and oversight of non-profits remain priorities.

Financial intelligence, international cooperation and swift prosecution together can cut the money lifelines of terror.

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The Supreme Court's recognition of privacy as a fundamental right in K.S. Puttaswamy (2017) made a data-protection statute a constitutional necessity; the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 is India's first such law.

Context

• A vast digital economy — Aadhaar, UPI and platforms processing personal data — with recurring breaches; the Justice B.N. Srikrishna Committee (2018), whose draft became the 2019 Bill, withdrawn in 2022 after a Joint Parliamentary Committee review.

Salient features

• Scope: digital personal data processed in India, and abroad when goods or services are offered to people in India.
• Consent-based processing with clear notice, plus defined 'legitimate uses'; Data Principals get rights of access, correction, erasure, grievance redress and nomination.
• Duties: Data Fiduciaries must secure data and report breaches; Significant Data Fiduciaries need a data protection officer, audits and impact assessments.
• Children: verifiable parental consent, with tracking and targeted advertising barred.
• Cross-border transfer allowed except to countries the Centre notifies.
• Enforcement: a Data Protection Board adjudicates; penalties up to ₹250 crore for failing to prevent breaches.
• Concerns: wide exemptions for the State, an executive-appointed Board, and dilution of the RTI Act's personal-information clause.

The Act is a strong start (its Rules were notified on 14 November 2025); its credibility now rests on an independent Board, narrow State exemptions and careful implementation.

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Social media and end-to-end encrypted apps have become channels for radicalisation, disinformation and covert coordination that the State cannot easily see — a security challenge that sits uneasily beside the right to privacy.

The security challenge

• Fake news and deepfakes that trigger communal violence; terror recruitment and propaganda; cross-border influence operations; encrypted planning that evades interception; and cyber-frauds run through platforms.

Measures adopted

• Legal: Section 69A of the IT Act 2000 for blocking (upheld in Shreya Singhal, 2015) and Section 69 for lawful interception; the IT Rules 2021 requiring due diligence, grievance officers, timely takedowns and, for large messaging platforms, identification of the first originator for serious offences; the Telecommunications Act 2023 and the DPDP Act 2023.
• Institutional: CERT-In for incident response, the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C) with the 1930 helpline and reporting portal, State cyber cells, and Grievance Appellate Committees (2023).
• Platform level: content moderation, fact-checking partnerships, in-country compliance officers for significant intermediaries, and transparency reports.
• International: mutual legal assistance treaties and cooperation through Interpol and the UN process on a cybercrime convention.

Further remedies

• Digital and media literacy in schools and communities to blunt disinformation at its source.
• AI tools to detect deepfakes and coordinated inauthentic behaviour, with mandatory labelling of synthetic media.
• Faster, treaty-based access to evidence held by foreign platforms, and a dedicated cyber cadre in State police.
• Narrow, judicially overseen lawful-access rules that keep encryption intact rather than weaken it for everyone.
• Independent oversight of blocking orders and periodic government transparency reports to sustain public trust.

Security in the digital age needs smart regulation, capable agencies and alert citizens — without trading away the privacy and free speech the Constitution protects.

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Terror groups need money as much as weapons, for recruits, arms, safe houses and propaganda, so choking their funds is central to counter-terrorism.

Major sources of terror funding

• State sponsorship and cross-border support routed through handlers.
• Hawala and other informal value-transfer channels.
• Fake Indian currency notes pushed across the border.
• Drug trafficking and smuggling, especially narco-terror through Punjab and Jammu and Kashmir.
• Extortion by insurgent and Maoist groups.
• Misuse of charities and non-profits, and newer channels: crowdfunding, virtual assets, online payment platforms and shell companies.

Efforts to curtail them

• Law: UAPA, amended in 2004 and 2019, makes terror financing an offence; PMLA 2002 targets laundering, with virtual-asset service providers brought under it in 2023.
• Agencies: FIU-IND tracks suspicious transactions; the NIA's terror-funding and fake-currency cell investigates; ED and NCB act on laundering and narcotics.
• Policy: KYC and reporting norms for banks and payment firms, monitoring of hawala, demonetisation in 2016 against fake currency, and FATF membership since 2010 for peer review.

The No Money for Terror Conference, November 2022

• Aim: the third ministerial conference (18-19 November 2022), after Paris (2018) and Melbourne (2019), reviewed the global regime against terror financing and sought coordinated action among states.
• Objectives: examine global trends in terror financing; map formal and informal fund channels; address emerging technologies such as virtual assets; and deepen international cooperation.
• India offered to host a permanent NMFT secretariat to keep the effort continuous.

Way forward

• Sustained pressure on state sponsors, FATF-style peer review, regulation of virtual assets, and faster intelligence and legal cooperation across borders.

Denying terrorists their money needs strict domestic enforcement and sustained international cooperation, the very agenda the New Delhi conference set.

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Cyber security protects the networks, devices and data of government, business and citizens; a national strategy ties the technical, legal and institutional pieces into one plan with clear accountability.

Elements of cyber security

• Technical: network, application, endpoint and cloud security; identity and access control; data protection and encryption; incident response and recovery.
• Human: user awareness, a skilled workforce and a security culture in organisations.
• National: protection of critical information infrastructure, law and policy, institutions, research and international cooperation.

Challenges

• State-linked and criminal attacks, ransomware and data breaches, dependence on foreign hardware and software, the wider attack surface of IoT and 5G, skill shortages and under-reporting of incidents.

How far India has a comprehensive strategy

• Building blocks exist: the IT Act, 2000 (amended 2008); CERT-In for incident response; NCIIPC for critical infrastructure; the National Cyber Security Policy 2013; the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre; and the Defence Cyber Agency.
• Recent tightening: CERT-In's directions of April 2022 require service providers, intermediaries, data centres, companies and government bodies to report cyber incidents within six hours.
• Gaps: the 2013 policy is dated and a full national strategy was still awaited at the time of the paper; agency roles overlap; State police capacity is thin; private-sector obligations remain limited.
• Verdict: India has assembled many of the pieces, but not yet a single, funded and comprehensive strategy that fixes accountability.

Way forward

• A published, funded strategy with clear roles; mandatory incident reporting enforced through audits and standards; indigenous technology; skilling; public-private partnership; and treaty cooperation.

India has built most of the parts; a single, well-resourced strategy with clear accountability is what would make them a system.

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Money laundering turns proceeds of crime into apparently clean assets through placement, layering and integration; technology and open borders speed up every stage and blur the trail.

How technology and globalisation help launderers

• Crypto assets and mixers move value outside banks; wallets, mule accounts and online gaming split sums into fast, small transfers that evade thresholds.
• Shell companies can be formed online across jurisdictions, hiding beneficial owners.
• Open capital flows, offshore centres, correspondent banking and trade misinvoicing move funds across borders faster than agencies can trace; uneven laws create havens.

National measures

• PMLA 2002: section 3 defines the offence broadly, from concealment to projecting proceeds as untainted; it allows attachment of proceeds, binds reporting entities and is enforced by the ED.
• FIU-India (2004) analyses suspicious and cash transaction reports; KYC and beneficial-ownership norms make banks and intermediaries detect and report.
• Supporting laws: Benami Transactions (Prohibition) Amendment Act 2016, Black Money Act 2015 and Fugitive Economic Offenders Act 2018.
• Regulate virtual assets, deploy analytics and AI for transaction monitoring, and share data across agencies in real time.

International measures

• FATF standards and mutual evaluations, now extended to virtual assets, with grey-listing as pressure; the Egmont Group for FIU-to-FIU intelligence exchange.
• UN conventions, mutual legal assistance treaties and tax-information exchange agreements.

Criminals adapt faster than statutes, so laws, technology and cross-border cooperation must be upgraded together.

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As grids, payments, governance and defence go digital, hostile states and proxies can strike India from abroad with deniability, making cyberspace an internal-security front.

Impact on internal security

• Critical infrastructure: attacks on power, nuclear, ports, banks and telecom can halt services; in 2019 malware was found in the Kudankulam plant's administrative network, isolated from control systems according to NPCIL.
• Espionage: state-linked groups target defence, government and strategic sectors; stolen data erodes military and diplomatic advantage.
• Crime and terror: ransomware, online fraud and crypto channels fund crime and terror networks.
• Information war: disinformation and radicalisation on social media aim to trigger unrest and communal tension.
• Attribution: attacks routed through proxies and foreign servers leave evidence and jurisdiction abroad, weakening deterrence and prosecution.

Defensive measures

• Institutions: CERT-In, the national agency under the IT Act for incident response; NCIIPC (2014) for critical information infrastructure; the Defence Cyber Agency (2018) for military networks; I4C (January 2020) for cybercrime coordination.
• Law: IT Act section 66F on cyber terrorism, mandatory security audits, trusted-source rules for telecom equipment, blocking of hostile apps and a data-protection law.
• Way forward: sectoral CERTs and mandatory incident reporting, a skilled workforce, indigenous hardware and software, regular drills, and partnerships on cyber norms and evidence sharing.

Resilience, not prevention alone, is the goal: assume breaches, detect early, recover fast and build deterrence with partners.

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Cyber crime is an unlawful act in which a computer or network is the tool, the target or both; India's main law on it is the Information Technology Act, 2000.

Types of cyber crime

• Against individuals: identity theft, phishing and online financial fraud, cyber stalking and bullying, sextortion and morphed images.
• Against organisations and infrastructure: ransomware and malware, denial-of-service attacks, hacking and data breaches, and attacks on power grids, banks and hospitals.
• Against the State and society: cyber terrorism and espionage, fake news and hate spread through social media, online radicalisation and cyber warfare.

Measures needed

• Law: enforce the IT Act, 2000 (Sections 66C, 66D and 66F on identity theft, cheating by personation and cyber terrorism) and penal provisions on fraud and stalking, plus a data-protection law (enacted since as the DPDP Act, 2023).
• Institutions: CERT-In for incident response, NCIIPC for critical information infrastructure, the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C) and the national cyber crime reporting portal, with trained police and forensic labs in every state.
• Technology: two-factor authentication, regular security audits, secure-by-design systems and prompt patching.
• People: cyber hygiene and awareness, especially for first-time internet users, women and children.
• Cooperation: with platforms for quick takedowns and with other countries on evidence and jurisdiction.

Fighting cyber crime needs sound law, capable institutions and alert citizens together, because technology changes faster than legislation.

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CyberDome is Kerala Police's cyber centre of excellence at Technopark, Thiruvananthapuram: a public-private partnership that pools police, government departments, industry, academia, ethical hackers and international agencies to prevent and investigate cyber crime.

How it helps control internet crime

• Prevention: threat intelligence, monitoring and awareness campaigns against online fraud and abuse; its Counter Child Sexual Exploitation centre traces offenders and gets abusive material removed.
• Investigation: volunteer ethical hackers and forensic experts help trace offenders and secure evidence; a drone forensic lab extends skills to new technology.
• Capacity: police training, threat research and in-house tools fill skill gaps in ordinary policing, with volunteer expertise adding scarce manpower at little cost.
• National template: each state could run such a hub linked to CERT-In, the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre and the national cyber-crime reporting portal, giving a common front against crime that crosses state lines.

Limits

• A state pilot cannot reach cross-border crime or encrypted and foreign-held data; it needs statutory backing, privacy safeguards for citizens' data, and cooperation from platforms and foreign agencies.

CyberDome shows that police, industry and academia working together can prevent and solve cyber crime; scaled up with legal backing and privacy safeguards, it can serve as a national model.

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Set up in July 2017 and reporting in July 2018 with a draft Personal Data Protection Bill, the Srikrishna Committee followed the Supreme Court's 2017 ruling that privacy is a fundamental right, and aimed at a 'free and fair digital economy'.

Strengths

• Coverage: one law binds government and private data fiduciaries alike, built on consent, purpose and collection limitation, data minimisation and transparency, and reaching processing linked to business in India.
• Rights: individuals get access, correction, portability and a limited right to be forgotten; fiduciaries owe a duty of fair and reasonable processing, with privacy by design.
• Enforcement: an independent Data Protection Authority, breach reporting, impact assessments for significant fiduciaries, and penalties of up to ₹15 crore or 4 per cent of global turnover give the law teeth.
• Constitutional footing: it answers the Court's call, repeated in the Aadhaar judgment of September 2018, for a robust data protection regime that balances individual interests with legitimate State concerns.

Weaknesses

• State exemptions: wide grounds such as security of the State and public order, without prior judicial approval, leave the largest data holder least constrained.
• Localisation: a mandatory local copy of all personal data and local-only storage of 'critical' data raise costs for firms without clearly improving security, and the Centre alone defines what is critical.
• Oversight and transparency: the regulator's independence from the executive was questioned, and the proposed change to the RTI Act's personal-information exemption could weaken transparency.
• Process: the draft was framed without wide public consultation on its final text.

My view

• The report is a sound, rights-based foundation, but its credibility rests on tighter checks on State access (necessity, proportionality, oversight), a truly independent regulator, workable localisation rules and open consultation before enactment.

A data protection law is only as strong as its limits on the State; with those limits fixed, the Committee's framework can turn the privacy right into everyday protection.

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India lies between the Golden Crescent (Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran) and the Golden Triangle (Myanmar, Laos, Thailand), the world's two main opium-producing regions, which makes it both a transit route and a destination for narcotics.

The linkages

• Narco-terrorism: drug money funds insurgent and terrorist groups, and drugs are at times bartered for weapons, as reported along the western border and in the north-east.
• Gunrunning: the same routes, carriers and handlers that bring heroin across the western and eastern borders move arms, ammunition and explosives, so a drug network is a weapons network.
• Money laundering: proceeds are washed through hawala, front companies, real estate and trade-based laundering, and the cleaned money finances further crime and terror.
• Human trafficking: organised networks exploit porous, unfenced borders to traffic women and children, and use victims as drug couriers; corruption in enforcement keeps the chain intact.
• Enablers: difficult terrain on the Punjab-Pakistan and Myanmar borders, the free movement regime with Myanmar, weak coastal surveillance, corruption and rising domestic demand.

Counter-measures

• Law and agencies: enforce the NDPS Act, 1985 and PIT-NDPS Act, 1988 through the Narcotics Control Bureau, with joint operations by BSF, customs, the Coast Guard and State police.
• Follow the money: the Prevention of Money Laundering Act, 2002 and FIU-India to trace hawala and trade-based flows, and confiscate assets.
• Borders: fencing, surveillance technology and coastal security, and a review of the free movement regime.
• Regional cooperation: intelligence-sharing with neighbours and under the UN drug conventions, since supply lies across the border.
• Demand side: treatment and de-addiction, awareness, and alternative livelihoods in poppy-growing areas.

Drugs, arms, money and trafficked people move through one criminal system, so the response must be equally joined up: sealed borders, tracked money, regional cooperation and less demand.

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As banking, power, transport and government services move online under Digital India, cyber attacks can steal data, freeze services and even damage critical infrastructure.

Potential threats

• Malware and ransomware: WannaCry (2017) locked systems worldwide; phishing, denial-of-service attacks and financial fraud target banks and citizens.
• Critical infrastructure: attacks on power grids, telecom, banking and transport can paralyse the economy; state-sponsored espionage and cyber terrorism threaten national security.
• Data theft: the 2016 debit card breach forced Indian banks to block and reissue cards on a large scale.
• Vulnerabilities: imported hardware and software, weak passwords, low awareness, shortage of skilled staff and poor incident reporting.

Security framework

• Law: the Information Technology Act, 2000 (amended 2008) penalises hacking (Section 66) and cyber terrorism (Section 66F), shields designated 'protected systems' (Section 70) and makes firms liable for lax data security (Section 43A).
• Institutions: CERT-In for incident response, NCIIPC for critical information infrastructure, a National Cyber Security Coordinator, and the National Cyber Security Policy, 2013.
• Practice: RBI's cyber security framework for banks (2016), sectoral audits, police cyber-crime cells and the Cyber Swachhta Kendra (2017) for cleaning infected devices.
• Gaps: no data protection law in 2017 (the Justice B.N. Srikrishna committee was set up that year), few trained officials, and India outside the Budapest Convention on cybercrime.

Strong law, alert institutions, skilled people and aware citizens must work together, because the weakest link decides the strength of the chain.

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Mob violence is the unlawful use of force by a crowd against a person or group, usually on rumour or suspicion, which substitutes the crowd's verdict for the courts and the police.

Causes

• Rumour on social media: WhatsApp messages about child-lifters led to several people being beaten to death in Jharkhand in May 2017; forwarding outruns any police response.
• Identity-based vigilantism: self-styled cow protectors killed Mohammad Akhlaq in Dadri (2015) and Pehlu Khan in Alwar (2017) and flogged Dalits in Una (2016); Junaid Khan was killed on a train near Ballabhgarh in June 2017.
• Impunity: slow trials, low conviction, police delay or complicity and political patronage teach crowds that violence carries no cost.
• Distrust of justice: crowds seek 'instant justice' against suspected thieves, rapists and witches, as when a rape accused was dragged from jail and lynched in Dimapur (2015).
• Crowd psychology: anonymity dissolves individual guilt, while prejudice, unemployment and frustration among young men supply the tinder.

Consequences

• Life and liberty: killings and injuries, fear among minorities and Dalits, families uprooted; Article 21 rendered hollow for the victims.
• Rule of law: the State's monopoly over force erodes, the police lose credibility, and each unpunished case invites the next.
• Social fabric: communal polarisation, cycles of retaliation and distrust between communities.
• Economy: cattle trade, dairy, leather and transport disrupted; investors and tourists read lynchings as State failure.
• Politics and image: governance discredited at home and India's human-rights record questioned abroad.

Way forward

• Prompt FIRs and fast-track trials, personal accountability of station officers and district magistrates, rumour-busting with platforms and local media, community policing and victim compensation (since then, the Supreme Court in Tehseen Poonawalla (2018) laid down preventive, remedial and punitive measures and urged Parliament to consider a special law).

Mob violence recedes only when policing is swift and impartial, officials answer for inaction, and rumour and hatred are countered before they turn into crowds.

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Terrorism strikes at the State's first duty, the safety of its citizens, and it lives on money, arms, ideology and safe havens; curbing it means cutting each of these lifelines.

Solutions

• Intelligence: strengthen the Multi-Agency Centre and NATGRID, integrate State intelligence, invest in human sources and technical surveillance, and share actionable inputs in real time.
• Policing and borders: modernise State police as first responders, fence and electronically watch borders, complete coastal security with marine police and the Coast Guard, and keep NSG hubs ready for rapid response.
• Law and courts: use the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, fast-track terror trials, protect witnesses, and give the National Investigation Agency the reach to pursue cross-State cases.
• Financial choke: the Prevention of Money Laundering Act, the Financial Intelligence Unit and FATF standards to trace and freeze funds.
• Countering radicalisation: monitor online recruitment, engage community and religious leaders, run deradicalisation and rehabilitation programmes, and expand education and jobs in Jammu and Kashmir, the Northeast and left-wing extremism districts.
• Diplomacy: press for the Comprehensive Convention on International Terrorism at the UN, use FATF and UN sanctions listings against sponsors, and deepen intelligence pacts with partners.
• Rights and trust: due process, no collective punishment and accountable security forces, so that counter-terrorism does not create the next recruit.

Major sources of terrorist funding

• Hawala and other informal transfers that leave no banking trail.
• Fake Indian currency notes pushed in through neighbouring countries.
• Narcotics from the Golden Crescent and Golden Triangle, and smuggling of gold and arms.
• Extortion, ransom and 'levies' on contractors, mining and transport, especially by left-wing extremists in central India.
• State sponsorship by hostile agencies.
• Charities, NGOs and diaspora donations diverted from their stated purpose.
• Cyber fraud, front companies and, increasingly, virtual currencies.
• India's counters: the Terror Funding and Fake Currency cell of the NIA, FCRA scrutiny of foreign funding, demonetisation (2016) aimed partly at counterfeit notes, and the UAPA offence of raising funds for terrorism.

Terrorism yields to a combined response: sharp intelligence, dried-up finance, fair and fast justice and communities that trust the State, backed by cooperation across borders.

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The internet lets a handful of people reach millions cheaply and anonymously, which serves propaganda, recruitment and rumour as readily as it serves commerce and education.

Misuse in the recent past

• Radicalisation and recruitment: ISIS used videos, online magazines and encrypted messaging apps to draw recruits, including a few Indian youth.
• Rumour and communal violence: in 2012 doctored images and mass messages triggered the exodus of north-eastern people from Bengaluru and other cities; a fake video helped ignite the 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots.
• Mobilisation: separatist groups use social media to organise stone-pelting and protests, as in Kashmir in 2016.
• Crime and finance: crowdfunding and virtual currencies for terror funds, dark-web markets for arms and drugs, defacement of government websites, and honey-trapping of defence personnel for espionage.

Guidelines to curb the threat

• Law: apply the IT Act, 2000, with blocking under section 69A and the safeguards upheld in Shreya Singhal (2015), which struck down the vague section 66A; use the UAPA against terror content.
• Platforms: due diligence by intermediaries, time-bound takedown on lawful orders, grievance officers and cooperation on user data through mutual legal assistance (since then, the IT Rules, 2021 codified these duties).
• Capacity: a national cyber crime coordination centre, CERT-In, cyber cells and forensic labs in every state police, and social media monitoring to detect rumours early.
• Counter-narrative: credible official information during crises, engagement with community leaders, and de-radicalisation programmes for returnees and sympathisers.
• Awareness and cooperation: digital literacy to verify before forwarding, and international cooperation on servers and evidence located abroad.
• Safeguards: every restriction must fall within Article 19(2), be necessary and proportionate, and face judicial or independent oversight; blanket internet shutdowns should be the rare exception.

Security and freedom online can coexist when clear law, accountable platforms, trained agencies and an informed public work together against those who exploit the medium.

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