In March 2023, a hacker group called the Indian Cyber Force broke into the Cox’s Bazar police server in Bangladesh and leaked data on about 270,000 citizens. Names and personal records of ordinary people ended up public. The group hit Khulna Metropolitan Police weeks later, on March 28.
That was an early case in a campaign that has run for years. The Indian Cyber Force is a hacktivist group based in India that carries out politically motivated attacks, often on countries with strained relations with India. Targets have included Canada, Pakistan, China, Palestine, Qatar, the Maldives and Bangladesh. Pakistan has been hit most.
The group has been described as pro-India and pro-Israel. Some of its attacks have been accused of being driven by Hindu nationalism and anti-Muslim sentiment. Its Twitter profile calls it “Non-Governmental.” Louis Hur, CEO of the threat intelligence platform StealthMole, alleged in a social media post that about 23% of its members are linked to Indian government-related entities, and speculated that it is likely state-backed.
Canada and the Gulf
In September 2023, after Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau alleged Indian government involvement in the killing of Khalistani leader Hardeep Singh Nijjar, the group launched “#OpCanada.” Its denial-of-service attacks knocked the Canadian Armed Forces and military websites offline for two hours and hit the House of Commons and Elections Canada. Restaurant and medical clinic sites were defaced, and the Ottawa Hospital site suffered a temporary outage. In October 2024, Canada’s Communications Security Establishment listed India as a “cyber threat.”
After the October 7 attacks, it went after Palestinian targets, including the Palestinian National Bank, the Palestinian Telecommunication Company and Hamas. It reportedly also got into more than 200 networking devices belonging to schools, hospitals and other institutions in Palestine. In November 2023 it turned on Qatar, after that country sentenced eight former Indian Navy officers to death in an espionage case.
Pakistan and Bangladesh
In June 2024, the group claimed to have hacked more than 150 IP cameras, including some belonging to the National Bank of Pakistan, and posted video from them. In August 2024 it released videos it said showed access to the network monitoring dashboard of Grameenphone and other internet providers in Bangladesh.
After the Pahalgam attack in April 2025, it claimed it had breached Habib Bank Limited and taken employee records, bank account details and salaries, posting a 6.6 MB sample as proof. It also claimed database breaches at Euro Oil, the AJK Supreme Court, the University of Balochistan and Sindh Police.
On May 6, the group said it compromised more than 1,000 IP cameras across Pakistan. It also leaked a 38.2 MB archive with records of over 150,000 students from the Islamia University of Bahawalpur, including passwords and home addresses. News9 reported that most of the data looked authentic. Three days later it leaked 150 gigabytes of data allegedly from Pakistan’s Federal Board of Revenue IRIS portal, containing names, phone numbers, addresses and tax records.
Webz.io, a web intelligence firm, named the group among the five most active hacktivist groups of 2024.
