{"id":2686,"date":"2026-08-17T20:40:10","date_gmt":"2026-08-17T20:40:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/diplomag.com.pk\/?p=2686"},"modified":"2026-08-17T20:42:18","modified_gmt":"2026-08-17T20:42:18","slug":"cybersecurity-threats-faced-by-pakistan-in-the-contemporary-digital-era","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/diplomag.com.pk\/index.php\/2026\/08\/17\/cybersecurity-threats-faced-by-pakistan-in-the-contemporary-digital-era\/","title":{"rendered":"How to deal with cybersecurity threats faced by Pakistan in the contemporary digital era?"},"content":{"rendered":"

An interview with Dr Hafeezur Rehman, an expert in artificial intelligence and CEO of ITSOLERA<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Question 1: Sources of cybersecurity risks faced by Pakistan and the major change in network threats<\/strong><\/p>\n

Geopolitical tensions, state-sponsored cyber espionage, financially driven cybercrime, hacktivism, insider risk, software vulnerabilities, insecure digital services and inadequate security practices by organizations are the key factors that affect Pakistan’s cybersecurity risk landscape. The National Cyber Security Policy of the Pakistan identifies ransomware, sophisticated phishing, IoT devices, cloud computing, critical infrastructure, AI, information operations, cyber skills shortage, and hacker for hires as the main cyber challenges. It also identifies energy, telecommunication, finance, water, healthcare, government systems, transport, emergency services, manufacturing and related infrastructure as critical sectors and areas of concern for increased protection.<\/p>\n

The threat in Pakistan is further compounded due to the country’s rapid advances in digital banking, mobile apps, cloud services, e-governance, telecommunication and enterprise network connectivity. The Cyber Shield Cyber Resilience Strategy 2025-2030 clearly states that the threat landscape has shifted from traditional website defacement and DoS attacks to advanced persistent attacks, ransomware, zero-day exploits, attacks on digital banking applications and attacks on credentials and payment card information. This means that the nation’s cyber threat has come to impact not only the availability of public-facing websites, but also the confidentiality and integrity of digital identities and data.<\/p>\n

Despite this, Pakistan has made significant strides in the national cyber-security scenario. According to the Global Cybersecurity Index 2024 released by International Telecommunication Union (ITU), Pakistan has been ranked in Tier 1, the highest level, for a score that has improved significantly on legal, technical, organizational, capacity building and cooperation aspects. It was reported that Pakistan has dropped to 40th rank in the latest edition from the 79th among the 187 countries on the list in the previous edition. This development does not mean that the country is low risk, instead, it reflects increased readiness at institutional level, in a growing threat environment.<\/p>\n

However, the overall trend in network attacks as compared to last year has shifted from relatively visible and perimeter-based to stealthier and identity-based, multi-stage and persistent attacks. While traditional threats like website defacement, simple viruses, commodity Trojans, and volumetric denial-of-service attacks still apply, the world today is increasingly home to a slew of sophisticated attacks that rely on compromised credentials, cloud services, remote-access, edge devices, vulnerable web applications, and administrative tools for legitimate purposes. According to Microsoft’s 2025 Digital Defense Report, the attackers are still leveraging common vulnerabilities in web resources and remote services, and they are using AI-assisted phishing attempts and multi-stage attack vectors are growing in frequency. Stolen credentials also emerged as the top second entry point for infections in Mandiant’s incident investigations in 2024 at 16 percent, the company reported.<\/p>\n

The development is not just a rise in attacks, rather it is a change in the type of attacks made by the attackers. Today’s attackers try to exploit legitimate credentials, trusted apps, cloud services, administrative tools and regular network protocols to make malicious activity seem legitimate. The 2026 CrowdStrike Global Threat Report also reveals significant growth in adversarial use of AI, the rise of cloud infrastructure, trusted identities, and unmanaged edge devices as key components of the adversarial attack surface.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Question 2: How Trojans, viruses, spear-phishing and APT attacks compromise networks, their attack chain, vulnerable Pakistani departments, and major APT actors<\/strong><\/p>\n

A conventional virus relies on the ability to execute malicious code and propagate itself, and a Trojan masks malicious activities as a legitimate application, document or utility. Spear is more targeted: rather than sending the same message to millions of people, the attacker does some research and comes up with a believable message, which is intended to get the recipient to open a document, click on a link, enter information, or download software. The threat of an APT campaign is that it takes multiple of these techniques in order to achieve a coordinated intrusion instead of treating the initial compromise as the end goal.<\/p>\n

An attack by an APT can be considered a series of steps starting with reconnaissance, selecting a victim, gaining initial access, executing the attack, persisting on the victim machine, acquiring credentials or privileges, discovery, lateral movement, command and control, collection, and exfiltration or disruption. In real world applications, these stages are often not linear. An attacker can then go back to earlier stages to gain more credentials, create other persistence options, gain access to more lucrative targets, and gain access after defensive measures are implemented. The Pakistan National CERT has also highlighted Adversary Profiling using tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) which means looking at the entire intrusion lifecycle instead of analysing and understanding individual malware samples. In March 2026, the National CERT of Pakistan reported on the profiling of 120+ hackers and APT actors who target government and critical infrastructure networks. It is important to note that this is not 120 distinct organizations that were newly identified in 2026, but rather >120 threat-actor profiles.<\/p>\n

In Pakistan, the most appealing options are ones that yield strategic information, national-security value, massive access, and control over vital services. Repeated interests in government ministries and officials, military and defence organisations, intelligence related personnel, telecommunications providers, financial institutions, energy and nuclear infrastructure, maritime and defence manufacturing organisations and diplomatic institutions are evident from publicly documented campaigns. The National Cyber Security Policy also defines the telecommunication, financial, energy, healthcare, water, transportation and government sectors as critical information infrastructure of Pakistan.<\/p>\n

SideWinder, Bitter, Patchwork and DoNot Team have been the most frequently reported APT groups against Pakistan in open-source threat intelligence sources in the period of around 2024 to 2026. Attribution is always a general term in cyber operations, and the ensuing evaluations are best seen as intelligence evaluations and not as factually determined.<\/p>\n

SideWinder is one of the most persistent threat to Pakistan’s government and defence interest. A previous campaign by Pakistan’s National CERT was reported with the use of phishing PDFs with the names of government offices and ministries. In the observed attacks that used the spear-phishing links, followed by exploiting weak client applications, and masquerading, the attackers stole credentials, discovered systems, retrieved files, sent encrypted command-and-control communications, and in some observed attacks, performed destructive actions.<\/p>\n

SideWinder was still operating in 2025. A Pakistani Government advisory revealed a campaign involving an email with a fake audit document, which led recipients to a second stage malicious payload from the Pakistan Navy’s Cyber Security Directorate (CSD). The technique illustrates a typical APT progression in which the victim is tricked into creating a trust relationship through social engineering, the first stage of the attack is initiated by a weaponized document, and the other stages of the attack are downloaded and executed only after the victim clicks on the lure.<\/p>\n

The targeting also has widened. In 2025, Kaspersky said that SideWinder was no longer just targeting government or military targets, and had diversified to target targets in the maritime and nuclear sectors in South Asia. The group continued to exploit known software weaknesses, and relied on spear phishing attacks rather than solely on newly discovered vulnerabilities. In April 2026, it was reported that SideWinder was again exploiting the names of reputable Pakistani institutions with fake domains and malicious links and impersonating these institutions to target Pakistani government employees and those associated with defence and finance-related institutions.<\/p>\n

Bitter\u2014also known as TA397\u2014has been especially interested in Pakistan’s telecommunications and strategic infrastructure. The most prominent and publicized recent one was on 7 May 2025 when Bitter was evaluated to have targeted Pakistan Telecommunication Company Limited staff during heightened tensions between India and Pakistan. The Counter Terrorism Department of Pakistan was targeted with the stolen credentials, after which spear-phishing messages were sent to officials of PTCL in technically sensitive roles like 5G infrastructure, DevOps, project management and satellite communications, researchers reported. The observed objective was in line with strategic cyber espionage and the use of remote-access malware.<\/p>\n

Bitter’s general tradecraft encompasses malicious attachments, infrastructure operated by the attacker and remote access Trojans like WmRAT and MiyaRAT. MITRE ATT&CK lists Pakistan, Asia, and government, energy, and engineering as its targets, and modern threat-intelligence reporting keeps it linked to government, defence, telecommunications, and critical-infrastructure targets in Asia and Pakistan.<\/p>\n

Another long-running South Asian cyber-espionage actor that has been known to target Pakistan is Patchwork. A campaign was spotted by ESET in 2024 in which twelve Android applications were employed to spread VajraSpy, a remote-access Trojan. A few of the applications were made available via Google Play and were featured as messaging or news applications and social-engineering and romance-scam techniques were employed to get victims to install them. If activated, the malware could be able to intercept messages and other confidential data. Additionally an advisory was issued by the telecoms regulator of Pakistan on the campaign.<\/p>\n

During 2025, Patchwork’s tradecraft continued to develop. Malicious documents, disguised Windows files, execution of PowerShell, and multi-stage delivery were some of the methods described in open-source reporting that were used against Pakistan. In a separate 2025 campaign, malicious MSC files disguised as PDFs and obfuscated scripting and remote-access malware were used, also as part of Patchwork activity. A threat report issued in January 2026 also linked Patchwork to attacking the defence sector of Pakistan using phishing-based project files and multi-stage attacks. It\u2019s a significant shift in how malicious documents are delivered: from straight up email-tentacled documents to more involved chains that use trusted Windows 10 features and seek to minimize the attacker’s presence of malware.<\/p>\n

DoNot Team or APT-C-35 is another recurring South Asian cyber espionage group that is targeting Pakistan. In late 2024, researchers observed campaigns targeting Pakistani maritime and defence manufacturing interests that involved a malicious LNK file that was disguised as a legitimate document and sent PowerShell commands, downloaded additional payloads and components, and ultimately executed a payload that referenced a Pakistani defence contractor in the lure. This activity has been reported by Kaspersky in Q4 2024 in the report on industrial threats.<\/p>\n

DoNot also expanded its operations on the Android platform. The group was associated with two Android apps, Tanzeem and Tanzeem Update, in late 2024 and early 2025, which appeared to be genuine communication apps. Once installed and permissions granted, the malware was able to steal call logs, contacts, text messages, GPS data, files and screenshots. The campaigns were judged ‘relevant’ towards South Asian (including Pakistan) government, military, foreign-ministry and diplomatic objects.<\/p>\n

The analysis of these groups shows them to share a common operational model. They don’t typically rely on a single exploit. Rather, they utilize victim profiling, contextually tailored lures, credential theft, malicious documents or application, multi-stage payload delivery, legitimate system utilities, persistence mechanisms, command-and-control (C&C) infrastructure, and selective data collection. The key difference is that with a conventional malware incident it may be discovered at the time of infection, while an APT operator will work to stay hidden following the initial compromise and will slowly expand one compromised point to access a larger information environment.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Question 3: Current status and recent attack methods of Bitter, Patchwork, SideWinder and DoNot<\/strong><\/p>\n

The findings of the latest evidence indicated that these four groups are still relevant in Pakistan but their intensity of operation is different and their campaigns are not visible in the open. At present, SideWinder is the most consistent threat to the government and strategic sector organisations in Pakistan. Its latest campaigns illustrate its ongoing use of trusted-organization impersonation, spear-phishing, malicious documents, credential theft, multi-stage payload delivery and penetration of new sectors like nuclear and maritime. What is notable about the group is that it’s high-volume targeting with targeted espionage against strategically valuable targets.<\/p>\n

Bitter is still very relevant in Pakistan’s telecom and strategic tech sector. The fact that it’s launching an attack on PTCL in May of 2025 shows a sophisticated approach using previously stolen credentials to make subsequent phishing attacks more plausible. It is important to focus on technical personnel instead of merely executives, as compromising engineers and administrators can give access to operational information, network architecture, credentials, and privileged systems.<\/p>\n

Patchwork has proven its versatility when it comes to changing platforms, moving from Android spyware and socially engineered apps to more intricate delivery chains utilizing Windows platforms. The activity for 2025 reflects a pattern in which threat actors more frequently exploit the functionality of the native operating system or trusted components rather than go the route of obvious standalone malware. This makes endpoint detection more complex as legitimate administrative activities may be intermingled with malicious activities that are executed.<\/p>\n

DoNot has also kept a wide-ranging toolkit for both Windows and Android. Recent campaigns indicate that it focuses on very targeted phishing and information collection, malicious document delivery, and disguised applications. Mobile communication using seemingly legitimate software is especially critical for Pakistan as the government and diplomatic community relies more and more on smartphones for operational communications.<\/p>\n

Thus these are the means of access and the traditional espionage converge in Pakistan’s current threat scenario. The common attack vector has changed from \u201cmalware enters a computer\u201d to \u201cmalware enters an application.\u201d \u201cA more accurate version is that reconnaissance\/TP targeting is followed by social engineering for initial access, a staged payload for execution\/persistence, acquisition of identity material, discovery of internal resources, collection of selected information, and hiding of command and control communication in normal network traffic.\u201d This trend is aligned with observations from other countries around the world that threats are increasingly leveraging the legitimate services, living-off-the-land methods, cloud platforms and compromised identities to bypass traditional defenses.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Question 4: Prevention, response after compromise, and the expected cyber threat trend over the next two years<\/strong><\/p>\n

You need to move away from perimeter security to constant risk management, identity protection, threat intelligence, segmentation and swift response to cyberattacks for effective protection in Pakistan. The first step is to determine which assets are important, sensitive data, privileged accounts, any outside exposure, and any dependency on cloud services, telecommunications services, third-party software and outside service providers. Internet-facing systems should be scanned on a regular basis to see if there are any known vulnerabilities; patch management should focus on vulnerabilities that are being exploited. Critical systems should be separated to ensure that an attack on a single endpoint cannot give a compromise user free rein to the rest of the system. The National Cyber Security Policy already puts a strong focus on risk-based controls, security standards, audits, monitoring, detection and response (MDR) of national critical information infrastructure (NCI).<\/p>\n

The creation of a national and organizational cyber-defence strategy that incorporates identity security as a key pillar should be a priority for Pakistan. While strong password is not enough as a countermeasure against modern credential theft, phishing, password spraying and infostealer activity. Email, VPNs, privileged accounts, cloud platforms, remote administration systems and other sensitive services should therefore use phishing-resistant multifactor authentication. CISA recommends, in particular, the use of phishing resistant multi-factor authentication and zero trust access controls on systems where compromised credentials are considered to be a risk.<\/p>\n

They should also have endpoint detection and response, centralized security logging, network detection, identity monitoring, email security, vulnerability management, and threat-intelligence in place. Endpoint, identity, network, email and cloud telemetry should not be viewed as separate alerts in a mature security operations capability, but rather they should be correlated together. This is particularly significant when dealing with APTs, where evidence of compromise can be spread across multiple systems and can be benign if viewed as a single system.<\/p>\n

Security visibility is also necessary as many of the latest campaigns targeting Pakistan have begun with very convincing social engineering attacks. Awareness training should not however be considered as a replacement for technical controls. Users are likely to eventually find themselves confronted with more complex phishing messages, impersonation attempts, malicious documents, or fake government websites. Thus, the security architecture should expect that human errors can occur and mitigate their impact by implementing least-privilege access, application control, MFA, segmentation and ongoing monitoring.<\/p>\n

If an organisation feels that it has been compromised, the initial measure should not be to delete suspect files but to contain it. Vulnerable systems should be isolated from the network, suspicious logins should be terminated, compromised credentials disabled or reset, and security teams should be collecting all logs, artifacts, memory, email headers, authentication logs, etc. that support a forensic investigation. Before systems are restored, a compromise must be worked out for its scope. NIST’s 2025 revision of SP 800-61 calls for embedding incident response practices into cybersecurity risk management, whereas CISA guidance suggests immediately isolating affected systems, first recovering systems based upon their criticality to the business and evidence preservation if feasible.<\/p>\n

It is important to remember that while the removal of visible malware doesn’t necessarily mean that the attacker is gone. The attacker might have stolen credentials, set up additional accounts, embedded persistence mechanisms elsewhere, and have created alternative communications. As part of the recovery, credential rotation, privileged account validation, persistence review, vulnerability remediation, threat hunting in the broader environment, and monitoring for reoccurrence should be done. Once recovered, the incident should be fully assessed to determine the initial access point and control failures that allowed the incident to happen.<\/p>\n

Looking ahead for the next two years, it is unlikely that traditional threats will go away, but rather threats from several threat classes will come together. In the upcoming 2027 and 2028, Pakistan will see a rise in identity compromise, ransomware, AI-powered social engineering, Internet of Things (IoT) exploitation, cloud and SaaS attacks, supply-chain compromises, and geopolitical cyber-espionage. As generative AI becomes more prevalent, it will make such reconnaissance, phishing customization, translation, malware development assistance, and social engineering easier and less costly, making moderately skilled actors potentially able to carry out activities that used to require more resources. The 2026 global assessment by CrowdStrike shows an 89 percent year-over-year rise in adversarial exploitation powered by artificial intelligence, and Microsoft has already seen the emergence of attacks using AI tools, such as phishing and multi-stage attacks.<\/p>\n

The strategic sectors remain appealing due to the government’s efforts to increase the digital financial services, telecoms infrastructure, adoption of cloud technology, digital identity services and interwoven public-sector systems in Pakistan. The financial sector has a specific focus on credential theft, fraud, ransomware, attacks on digital banking interfaces and third party providers. Telecommunications and energy networks will continue to be strategic systems of interest because being able to compromise these systems creates intelligence and disruption opportunities. The growing interdependency between government, finance, telecom, cloud services, and software vendors also implies that if one organization makes a compromise, it can spill over through trusted relationships or supply chains. Also, the 2025 ENISA Threat Landscape highlights dependency abuse, phishing, vulnerability exploitation, ransomware, and living-on-the-land as primary topics of discussion for today.<\/p>\n

The biggest strategic forecast, therefore, is that cybersecurity will be a matter of Pakistan’s resilience instead of just prevention. No guarantees can be made that all intrusions will be prevented. The goal should be to make it hard to intrude, costly to move laterally, easy to detect, easy to limit data exfiltration, easy to recover, and easy to make it difficult to intrude again. A robust, Pakistani cybersecurity framework requires national threat intelligence, sector-specific CERT teams, robust identity management, zero-trust principles, continuous monitoring, AI-driven defensive intelligence, periodic red team exercises, secure software and supply chain practices, cybersecurity personnel training, and quick engagement with government, military, telecom, financial, academic, and private sector entities. It’s also aligned with the National Cyber Security Policy and their current drive to enhance the national CERT capabilities and cyber-defence infrastructure in the country.<\/p>\n

In general, cyber threat environment in Pakistan is shifting from opportunistic attacks to intelligence driven and identity oriented cyber operations. The central risk is no longer whether an organization can stop malware from entering its network, it’s about whether the organization can detect a sophisticated attack, stop privilege escalation and lateral movement, secure high value information, and recover without the adversary being able to return. The convergence of APT operations, cybercrime, cloud exploitation, credential theft, ransomware, and AI indicates that cybersecurity now needs to be viewed as a nationwide resilience function, not just an information-technology discipline.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An interview with Dr Hafeezur Rehman, an expert in artificial intelligence and CEO of ITSOLERA   Question 1: Sources of cybersecurity risks faced by Pakistan and the major change in network threats Geopolitical tensions, state-sponsored cyber espionage, financially driven cybercrime, hacktivism, insider risk, software vulnerabilities, insecure digital services and inadequate security practices by organizations are […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":2687,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,113],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2686","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-featured","category-interview"],"yoast_head":"\nHow to deal with cybersecurity threats faced by Pakistan in the contemporary digital era? - Diplomag<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/diplomag.com.pk\/index.php\/2026\/08\/17\/cybersecurity-threats-faced-by-pakistan-in-the-contemporary-digital-era\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"How to deal with cybersecurity threats faced by Pakistan in the contemporary digital era? 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