According to the report, the rapid transformation of the banking and financial sector is forming a fundamentally new landscape of cyber threats, as traditional security models are no longer capable of handling tasks in modern interconnected ecosystems.
The document 'Digital Threat Report 2025-26', published on Monday, notes that previous cybersecurity architectures were designed for centralized systems with clearly defined trust boundaries. However, the current financial environment is built on interconnected platforms, embedded finance, AI-driven decision-making, and real-time payments, which significantly expands the attack surface.
According to the new report prepared by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In), the Cyber Security Incident Response Team in Finance (CSIRT-Fin), and SISA, modern financial attacks are shifting from direct hacking to manipulating trust chains. These manipulations affect biometric registration, partner applications, AI decision-making processes, real-time payments, APIs, programmable finance, and third-party ecosystems.
Attackers exploit gaps between different systems, institutions, and workflows where no single owner has a complete picture of what is happening. This results in a new threat model where a security breach is no longer limited to credentials or transactions but penetrates into areas of identification, AI, APIs, payment logic, and supply chains.
The combination of the irreversibility of real-time payments, AI-driven decision-making, programmable financial logic, continuous identity planes, and ecosystem-dependent operations creates a threat environment where speed, complexity, and interdependence are simultaneously amplified. Although regulatory frameworks are attempting to catch up with the changes, they lag behind the evolving architecture itself.
This time gap between structural changes and the adaptation of security models is the 'window' actively exploited by sophisticated attackers. The report emphasizes that a design focused on centralized control and limited trust is inapplicable in the current operational environment.
It was warned that as digital services span multiple platforms, the fragmentation of security and identity-based access increases risks. Compromising one identity could potentially grant persistent access to numerous accounts and services across various platforms. When identification becomes the primary control plane for access and transactions, built on biometrics, continuous authentication signals, and cross-system token chains, compromising one profile no longer affects just one account, providing broad and resilient cross-system access.
Furthermore, compliance monitoring, which relies on control signals, becomes a 'weapon' as attackers can hide logs, alter alert thresholds, and maintain the appearance of a clean state while operating within a compromised environment. Thus, the threat surface is no longer a perimeter but a distributed, continuous, changing network of relationships between partners, platforms, models, APIs, and infrastructure layers, none of which is under the full control or ownership of an institution.
The Central Bank of Uzbekistan has included growing cyber risks in the list of major threats to the country's financial stability within its 2025 financial stability review.
According to the regulator's assessment, the accelerated digitalization of payment systems is accompanied by an increase in cyber incidents. Attacks, information security breaches, and data theft lead to increased operational losses for participants in the financial system and can undermine public trust in this system. The Central Bank views the loss of this trust as a primary channel of risk to financial stability.
Market participants share this concern. In a survey on systemic risks conducted among banks, cyberattacks were cited as one of the threats that could negatively affect the financial system of Uzbekistan. Other threats mentioned alongside cyberattacks include defaults by large borrowers, economic downturn, and climate risks.
Nevertheless, geopolitical factors (56% of responses), growing household debt burden (32%), and exchange rate volatility (31%) remain at the top of the threat ranking.
As a countermeasure, the Central Bank announced the implementation of an artificial intelligence-based monitoring system to track suspicious transactions and introduce restrictions on operations flagged as suspicious. The regulator expects participants in the financial system to continuously improve and maintain resilient information security systems.
A third aspect of the response measures focuses on increasing financial literacy. The Central Bank plans to intensify efforts to inform citizens about fraudulent schemes and cyberattacks, noting that a significant portion of citizen losses is related to social engineering methods rather than technical infrastructure failures.
