We don't make publicly big announcements. In fact, when a bad guy comes in, they get into infrastructure, they don't talk to anyone. But we should be able to see, identify, and measure working with government agencies to see the impact we're making.
I think the protection level—when you see customers being protected, we don't inform them, but they are being protected. Or if there's a spam warning, we'll do that. In this particular case, given his enterprise, you will just be protected. And if there are some battles being detected, they'll go to the appropriate agencies in the country.
Sir, I just wanted to exactly understand what will be the Airtel's role in this initiative, and if you can broadly also talk about the investments, anything which has gone into this.
Yeah. So, as I said, it's not a commercial venture, but Zscaler and we are committing to fund this whole initiative to kick off. I'm sure more and more people will join. We already have received interest from many other enterprises in the country. So money will be more like our give-back to the nation, more in the area of philanthropy or CSR that we'll do from the Airtel side and Zscaler from their side. In terms of the investments that are required in infrastructure, I think Airtel's infrastructure, which is huge across the country, is going to be available to this research center to ride on, to look at all the connected nodes in the country and pick up these actors. So our contribution is our large base, our network, and of course our working with the government, which we have been doing for a long period of time.
If I may add, in addition to network, Airtel has monitoring capabilities as signals are coming in, so they can help in the monitoring area. Our core competency comes from doing actual research to identify what's good and what's bad. So it's a very complementary relationship.
Danish from Moneycontrol. Airtel already has a large base of enterprises and SMBs. Do you also kind of bring that base to this partnership?
I think we already use Zscaler for serving our customers. That commercial part has been going on for a while now, where we have besides Zscaler some other providers like Palo Alto and others. This research center is really to start identifying the patterns and the bad actors so that we can save many other nodes of the country. So it's two different areas: one is working with the scale of our enterprises and SMBs that's been going on for a while. Thank you.
I think with that we can maybe take one or two more questions.
Reporter from Times of India
2:39 ↗
This is from the Times of India. I just want to understand, maybe in terms of the nature of investments, what are the kind of people who would be working in these labs, or are these existing employees of both your companies who are going to be working here?
So we, as you know, we have over 3,000 data scientists in Airtel. Some of them, Praint is here. They are going to be dedicated along with Zscaler's team, but a lot of researchers are coming from your side?
Yes, we got lots of researchers, and more importantly, we also have telemetry and data. If you have both, you can do some great research.
And is there a timeline where the first achievement or milestone of sorts is going to be perhaps unlocked in the quarters to come?
No. Um, is there a timeline that is set in terms of the next few quarters? What are some milestones that can be unlocked for the first pilot that can perhaps come out of this initiative?
So the research is starting immediately. As I said, we have a team in place already. Okay. Now it's being dedicated for India's research, and we expect on a monthly basis to actually review key results and work with some of the government bodies who are actually focused on cyber research to make sure jointly we can be safer than we are otherwise.
Hi, Mr. Chaudhry. Today's announcement mentions Threat Labs India's work on detecting a lot of the kind of attempts that have already been detected by threat labs. Can you give us some color on what countries these threat actors are operating out of that you have detected at a large scale?
So when you think about threats that are targeted at India, it's very easy to guess where they're coming from. My number one source has been Pakistan. Especially when Operation Zarb-e-Azb happened, there was tons of activity that picked up. And what would some of those things be? Creating fake documents for rehearsal of blackout during the war. People may want to read it and say, 'Ah, I want to learn about it.' As soon as you click on it, the malware comes down, infects your PC. The other activity we saw where they would advertise specific jobs and send it to people. 'Here's a job in the defense department for contract-related stuff.' It infects us. We saw about 1.2 million brute force attempts trying to break into passwords to get people.
Our president and his family say that sharing is a good thing. In the US, for example, banks share that intel with each other. So we expect a number of other leaders, especially in the critical area, to join this initiative because of this intel sharing.
Well, thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Congratulations.
We announced something which is very critical in any part of the world today, but importantly, the cyber threat service is going exponentially, geometrically out in every aspect, especially given that AI is now being used extensively by even the bad actors. It is only with technology, AI-based technology, that we encounter the threat that our nation, our networks, our connected enterprises face in our country. Government enterprises are no more protected than anybody else. In fact, the threat quotient is even higher in government entities. To that extent, Jay and I met some time back, and we decided that we need to put our resources—the entire resources that Airtel has in its command and the technological prowess that Jay Chaudhry has—combine it in the form of a research center here in India, which I'll have Jay talk about in a moment. And with that, we believe we will start a wave of a new initiative in the country where we are properly inviting other enterprises, government agencies, academia to join and make it bigger and bigger so it becomes the main agency for protecting our nation. So with that, I will invite Jay to say a few words before I invite the honorable minister.
Okay. Thank you, Sunil-ji, honorable minister-ji. Personally, it's a very exciting day for me and for Zscaler. We have been building this company to be the leader in cybersecurity and have been serving many Indian organizations. But as I've been seeing more and more threats becoming more and more dangerous, and they're dangerous for critical infrastructure as well, so we thought why don't we have a focused team that can do research to identify some of these cyber and AI-related threats that could undermine and create issues for our critical infrastructure. What do I mean by that? When adversaries want to take an action, imagine if they can take the banking system out, if they can disrupt power, if they can disrupt transportation, that can create a lot of issues. Zscaler has tons of telemetry about some of this activity because while we process normal traffic of enterprises, the bad guys go through the common sense—they try to figure out what's weakness and why not. Our exchange sees all of that kind of stuff. So with that telemetry, we believe we'll be able to identify many, many threats for our critical infrastructure, and once we know it, we can remediate and take actions about it. So that's the focus. We already have a sizable research team in India, and we're going to direct a portion of the team just to look for threats that are directed towards, dedicated for India. So I'm very excited about it, and getting government support to look at these things proactively is a wonderful step. So very, very excited to unveil this research center.
Thank you, Mr. Mittal. Thank you, Jay. This entire initiative of setting up a research facility for cybersecurity is something which, when Jay and Sunil came and discussed with me, I encouraged them and told them that we should have many more such research institutes because the cyber threats are going to increase in future with AI becoming the norm. The nature of cyber threats is going to totally, totally change. In that scenario, how should be our response? I think a large number of industry participants should take it as a matter of top priority. Definitely, all the telecom operators must look at this, the major IT companies, they must also seriously look at a totally new way of countering the cyber threats, and that's very important. We also have to create a new legal framework for cybersecurity. With all these challenges that we are facing today and the new opportunities that we have, time has come when the industry and the government, we work in harmony, in alignment for tackling these new threats. I would like to thank both Zscaler and Airtel for taking this initiative, and would like to request other tech industry participants to have similar initiatives. Thank you.
Thank you, sir. We now move towards the book unveiling. This is an opportunity for you to do the photo op as well.
Thank you very much. We have the next five minutes for Q&A.
We keep our customers' security at the uppermost level. You've seen the agile spam solutions. We have been able to reduce spam fraud on our networks by nearly 68%. As seen by the authorities, you would have seen 'catch and spam warning.' What you get is where we have some mild doubts and therefore the indication has been a spam. There are billions of messages and calls which have been blocked and are never seen by you. So that has been our article to keep our customers secure, but today the initiative is to keep our country safe, our citizens safe.
