The story so far: Public Sector bank State Bank of India (SBI), the country’s biggest commercial bank with 53 crore customers — meaning every third Indian is an account holder — and a FY26 net profit of over ₹80,000 crore, informed stock exchanges on Wednesday (October 21, 2026), about a customer data breach on the Dark Web. The incident was reported on October 16, 2026, but SBI admitted the breach only after five days.

In a stock exchange filing, SBI said it had experienced an incident involving the loss of certain data. It stated that on October 16, 2026, it received communications from its Threat Intelligence Service Provider, the Defence Cyber Agency, and CERT-In regarding an alert about the suspected exposure of its customer data on the dark web. While it did not yet know where the data came from, SBI said it had engaged a CERT-In–empanelled agency to investigate.