India's premier Defence Cyber Agency (DCyA), in collaboration with the tri-services - the Indian Army, Air Force, and the Navy - are currently carrying out week-long cyber defence drills to assess the country's preparedness against a large-scale cyber-attack from its adversaries, news daily Mint reported, citing sources.
The report stated that with the threat of cyber-attacks from Pakistan and China rising manifold in recent years, the exercise was meant to test the durability of India's critical assets in both the civilian and military domains.
The three armed forces branches as well as the DCyA are currently engaged in evaluating whether India's cyber security system is good enough to thwart a hypothetical simultaneous attack from Pakistan and China.
Also, the security agencies were assessing the robustness of "protective firewalls" to secure infrastructure vital for India's security.
The exercises come days following a forensic analysis carried out after a hacking episode at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) suggested that the attack originated from China.
In November 2023, the AIIMS, India's premier state-run medical institution, came under a ransomware attack, forcing the facility to go offline for at least a month.
Keeping this in mind, Indian security agencies underlined the need to fortify the country's critical infrastructure as the alleged threat of a Chinese ransomware or malware attack was high.