The Canadian Centre for Cyber Security (Cyber Centre), part of the Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSE), recently released its National Cyber Threat Assessment 2025-2026 (NCTA 2025-2026).
NCTA 2025-2026 claims to “provide the Canadian public with CSE’s current insights on the state and non-state cyber threat actors conducting malicious cyber threat activity against Canada and how we assess the cyber threat landscape will evolve in the next two years.” The Canadian Centre for Cyber Security (Cyber Centre) is Canada’s technical authority on cyber security, and part of the Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSE).
The report, whose last edition was issued two years ago, comes amid an escalating diplomatic row between the two countries. The relations between India and Canada are at their lowest following Prime Minister Justin Trudeau‘s allegations in September last year of a “potential” involvement of Indian agents in Khalistan extremist Hardeep Singh Nijjar‘s killing. The Indian government has rejected Trudeau’s charges as “absurd”.
India named for the first time in the cyber threat report
This is the first time that Canada has named India in a list of cyberthreat adversaries, suggesting that state-sponsored actors could be spying against it. Incidentally, there was no mention of India in the National Cyber Threat Assessment reports of 2018, 2020 and 2023-24.
What the threat report claims about India
The report names India among the five countries that it terms “state-sponsored actors” likely engaged in cyberspying against Canada. India is ranked fifth in this list, the other four are: China, Russia, Iran and North Korea; ranked in the same order.
“India’s leadership almost certainly aspires to build a modernised cyber programme with domestic cyber capabilities. India very likely uses its cyber programme to advance its national security imperatives, including espionage, counterterrorism, and the country’s efforts to promote its global status and counter narratives against India and the Indian government,” the assessment report said.
“We assess that India’s cyber programme likely leverages commercial cyber vendors to enhance its operations. We assess that Indian state-sponsored cyber threat actors likely conduct cyber threat activity against Government of Canada networks for the purpose of espionage,” it said further.
“We judge that official bilateral relations between Canada and India will very likely drive Indian state-sponsored cyber threat activity against Canada,” it claimed.
Indian government on the Canadian cyberthreat threat report
India has slammed Canada for naming it in the list of countries considered cyber threat “adversaries”, describing the “categorisation” as another example of the Canadian strategy to “attack” the country. The Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal said, “Another category, Canada has put India into. This categorisation is as per the cyber report that they have issued. It appears to be another example of a Canadian strategy to attack India.” While rejecting India being bracketed in that category, the MEA spokesperson said, “You first state absurd and baseless things and then level such an accusation against us. This is absolutely not right”.