#FactCheck- Hong Kong Fire Video Falsely Shared as Footage of Recent Israeli Attack on Iran

Introduction

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Cyberwarfare has evolved into one of the most decisive instruments of statecraft and conflict. The increasing digitisation of critical infrastructure like power grids, water systems, transportation systems, healthcare networks, and energy sources has made these systems new targets in the war of algorithms. Military logic is evolving to paralyse the nation’s critical infrastructure to keep its resources engaged in repairing them and thereby break the nation’s ability to deter and counter attacks, all without firing a single bullet. 

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From Ransomware to an Invisible Sabotage: The changing nature of warfare

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The operational technology (OT) landscape has become the epicentre of cyber operations, all around the world. Once, which was insulated, related to industrial systems that controlled turbines, pipelines, or dams, they now stand connected to the Internet through supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) and the Internet of Things. These connections have also become gateways for attackers, besides enhancing the efficiency of the infrastructural lifelines of the nation.   

Groups like Volt Typhoon, Sandworm, Laurionite, and Cyberavengers have transformed the art of digital infiltration into a strategic shift. Volt Typhoon, which is linked to China, has used “living-off-the-land” techniques to exploit the legitimate administrative tools to remain invisible while scanning the critical infrastructures in the US. Sandworm, which is aligned with Russia’s GRU (Glavnoye Razvedyvatelnoye Upravlenie) or Main Intelligence Directorate (in English), has demonstrated the power of cyber sabotage in real time, as its attacks on Ukraine’s power grids in 2015 and 2021 had left millions in darkness, coinciding with kinetic missile strikes. Meanwhile, the Iranian-affiliated Cyberavengers group, which has weaponised the AI-assisted malware, such as IOCONTROL, that are capable of hijacking water and energy control systems. Each of these systems used in these operations reflects a shift from direct espionage activities to a state of strategic paralysis. 

In comparison to the traditional cybercrime activities that are aimed at stealing data and extortion of money, these campaigns repeatedly target the physical systems, which consist of the machinery that sustains civilian life and military preparedness.  

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The Military Logic behind Cyber Targeting: A Web of Vulnerabilities 

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A critical infrastructure is a complex ecosystem that covers power generation, transportation, communication, and manufacturing are all interconnected, which means a single compromised node can cascade into a national paralysis. For instance, a breach in the systems of the dam can flood an entire city, a grid shutdown can halt water supply to hospitals, and even affect air traffic. The 2015 Black Energy Malware attack in Ukraine has proved this possibility when three utilities were hacked, plunging thousands of homes into darkness. The Iranian hackers once again gained access to the Bowman Avenue Dam of New York and controlled its floodgates, which gave a chilling demonstration of the destructive reality of digital manipulation. 

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The systems remain vulnerable mainly for 3 reasons such as- 

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• Legacy Architectures: Many of these industrial systems were designed decades ago with no built-in cybersecurity mechanisms. 
• Slow Patching and Segmentation Gaps: All updates and segmentation between IT and TO networks often lag, providing open entry points for attackers. 
• Converging with IoT: The integration of smart sensors and cloud-based management tools has expanded the attack surface exponentially. 

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This interconnected fragility has turned our critical infrastructures into both a weapon and a target or a tool for coercion in modern hybrid warfare. Between 2023 and 2024, over 420 cyberattacks were witnessed in several critical global infrastructures, which averaged to 13 attacks per second, according to a news report. These were not just random acts of digital vandalism; they were deliberate and coordinated operational attempts by state-led actors from China, Russia, and Iran. 

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Developing a new Resilience as the new tool of Deterrence 

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Cyber deterrence no longer rests on the fear of retaliation, it relies on the need for resilience. Nations that can absorb attacks, maintain continuity, and recover rapidly would be the true superpowers of this digital age. Segmentation, real-time threat detection, and AI-assisted recovery models are vital pillars of this model of resilience. The logic of modern cyberwarfare is clear, which means that the more a nation digitizes, the more it will need to defend itself. 

However, as the line between war and peace blurs, safeguarding critical infrastructure is no longer just an IT priority; rather, it is a national security doctrine. In this silent theatre of cyberwarfare, survival will depend not only on firepower, but on firewalls. 

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References

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• https://rmcglobal.com/critical-infrastructure-under-siege-the-top-ot-threats-of-2025/
• https://ccdcoe.org/uploads/2018/10/Geers2009_The-Cyber-Threat-to-National-Critical-Infrastructures.pdf
• https://www.researchgate.net/publication/335752979_Cybersecurity_of_Critical_Infrastructure 
• https://arxiv.org/html/2510.04118v1 ‍
• https://www.anapaya.net/blog/top-5-critical-infrastructure-cyberattacks

Introduction

At 4 pm on August 3, 2026, representatives of Meta, X, Snapchat and Google walked into a room in Parliament to face India's Standing Committee on Communications and Information Technology. On paper, it looked like one more instance of a routine that has repeated for half a decade: a Big Tech company gets called in, questioned, and sent away with a warning. But this summons, and the fortnight of scrutiny that has followed it, reveals something different about the direction of India's digital governance in 2026. The government's question has stopped being, "Will you take this post down?" It has increasingly become, "How does your platform actually work, and can we redesign the parts we don't like?"

The trigger: A technical glitch that became a systemic complaint

The proximate cause of the August 3 hearing was almost trivial by itself. On July 23, Prime Minister Narendra Modi posted a video on Instagram and Facebook about the government's crackdown on examination paper leaks. Meta briefly restricted the Facebook version before restoring it, blaming the removal on a technical error in its automated filters.

That explanation didn't satisfy the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MEITY), which called it inadequate, and the incident became the occasion for a much broader reckoning. Committee chairperson Nishikant Dubey summoned Meta, X, Snapchat and Google to examine three things: the online safety of women and children; the data privacy of ordinary citizens, including farmers and labourers; and how far platforms actually comply with India's law-and-order requirements. Days later, MeitY brought Meta's global team in for two days of direct questioning that stretched into a third day of technical discussions covering child sexual abuse material (CSAM), deepfakes, bot accounts and, notably, the design of Instagram's content-recommendation algorithm itself.

From takedown notices to systems audits

For most of the last decade, India's approach to online harm ran through blocking orders and the "notice-and-takedown" machinery built into the IT Rules, 2021: a court or government authority flags a specific URL or post, the platform has a fixed window to act, and non-compliance risks the loss of legal immunity. It was a model built around individual pieces of content.

What is unfolding now looks structurally different. Officials aren't only asking Meta to remove a video; they are asking why its recommendation systems keep resurfacing flagged material, why "verified" accounts belonging to prominent or official figures don't have extra layers of human review before restriction, and why bot-detection and CSAM-screening pipelines aren't catching harmful content before it spreads. The Supreme Court-monitored committee tracking "digital arrest" fraud has gone further still, directing MeitY, the Department of Telecommunications and the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C) to study time-based restrictions on audio and video calls altogether, a proposal that touches the basic architecture of how calling features work, not any single conversation.

Parliament's committee has separately pushed for a national registration system that would require every intermediary operating in India to publicly list its grievance officer, nodal contact and compliance officer as a response to law enforcement's repeated difficulty simply reaching a platform when something goes wrong. It has also asked for tighter regulation of digital advertising, which officials say is routinely exploited for cyber fraud, and for rules under Section 67C of the IT Act governing how long intermediaries must preserve user data. None of this is about any one post; it is about redesigning the infrastructure platforms use to operate in India.

Messaging apps and the encryption problem

Nowhere is the shift from "content" to "architecture" clearer than in the government's dealings with peer-to-peer messaging platforms. WhatsApp has spent years contesting the traceability requirement under Rule 4(2) of the IT Rules in the Delhi High Court, arguing it would rather exit India than build a permanent capability to identify the "first originator" of every message since doing so would mean re-engineering its end-to-end encryption for all users, not just suspects.

That fight has resurfaced in a new form. In a submission to the parliamentary committee, WhatsApp argued that new rules requiring platforms to detect and label AI-generated "synthetic" content cannot technically apply inside encrypted chats because no one outside a conversation "not even WhatsApp" can see what's inside it. Signal has proven even harder to engage with: MeitY told the committee it has struggled to establish formal contact with the app, which does not publicly list a grievance officer, exposing how little leverage the government currently has over encrypted, minimally staffed platforms compared with advertising-funded giants like Meta and Google. The proposal to cap or restrict call durations to fight "digital arrest" scams is, in effect, an attempt to regulate a messaging feature rather than any message sent through it, perhaps the clearest sign yet that the fight has moved from posts to plumbing.

The future of "safe harbour"

Underpinning all of this is Section 79 of the IT Act,  the "safe harbour" clause that shields platforms from liability for what their users post, provided they exercise due diligence. That protection is now being squeezed from three directions at once. The parliamentary committee has unanimously recommended withdrawing safe harbour from platforms that don't comply with Indian law and said it should be pulled specifically from Meta unless its CEO apologises over the PM's video takedown, though a committee cannot itself revoke a statutory protection; only Parliament can amend Section 79. Separately, the Supreme Court-monitored panel on digital-arrest fraud is examining an explicit provision making intermediaries liable for the misuse of their platforms so that fraud victims could claim compensation directly. And MeitY's draft Second Amendment Rules, circulated in March 2026, go furthest of all: they propose making safe harbour conditional on real-time compliance with executive directions, rather than a general protection available to any platform that follows published rules, which is a more direct, command-driven model than even the European Union's Digital Services Act.

Why this matters beyond the headlines

For the ordinary internet user, none of this is abstract. A registration-and-disclosure regime, together with faster and more accountable grievance handling, could make it easier to get genuinely harmful content addressed. But architecture-level intervention cuts both ways. Rules aimed at traceability or at labelling encrypted content risk weakening the very privacy protections that make messaging apps trustworthy in the first place, and a safe harbour that hinges on obeying informal executive directions, rather than settled published law, hands the government far more day-to-day leverage over what stays online. The Supreme Court has listed the digital-arrest matter for September 16; how it, and Parliament, ultimately treat Section 79 will decide whether India's platforms remain neutral pipes carrying other people's speech or become extensions of state enforcement.

Conclusion

India’s digital-governance battle is no longer confined to individual posts or takedown orders. It is increasingly about the architecture beneath the internet: recommendation engines, encryption, verification, data retention and safe-harbour protections. That shift may strengthen accountability and user safety, but it also expands the state’s influence over digital infrastructure. As Parliament and the Supreme Court confront these questions, India faces a fundamental choice: regulate platforms or reshape how they operate.

Sources

• Parliament panel summons Meta, X, Google, Snapchat over digital safety — Hindustan Times
• Parliamentary panel summons Meta, Google, X and Snapchat over social media regulation — Economic Times
• Parliamentary Panel Summons Meta, X, Google on Digital Safety Rules — Asianet Newsable
• Panel Summons Meta, X, Snapchat, Google for Safety Review — New Kerala
• Meta, X, Google and Snapchat summoned by parliamentary panel on August 3 — BestMediaInfo

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Executive Summary:

A fake photo claiming to show the cricketer Virat Kohli watching a press conference by Rahul Gandhi before a match, has been widely shared on social media. The original photo shows Kohli on his phone with no trace of Gandhi. The incident is claimed to have happened on March 21, 2024, before Kohli's team, Royal Challengers Bangalore (RCB), played Chennai Super Kings (CSK) in the Indian Premier League (IPL). Many Social Media accounts spread the false image and made it viral.

Claims:

The viral photo falsely claims Indian cricketer Virat Kohli was watching a press conference by Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on his phone before an IPL match. Many Social media handlers shared it to suggest Kohli's interest in politics. The photo was shared on various platforms including some online news websites.

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Fact Check:

After we came across the viral image posted by social media users, we ran a reverse image search of the viral image. Then we landed on the original image posted by an Instagram account named virat__.forever_ on 21 March.

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The caption of the Instagram post reads, “VIRAT KOHLI CHILLING BEFORE THE SHOOT FOR JIO ADVERTISEMENT COMMENCE.❤️”

Evidently,  there is no image of Congress Leader Rahul Gandhi on the Phone of Virat Kohli. Moreover, the viral image was published after the original image, which was posted on March 21.

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Therefore, it’s apparent that the viral image has been altered, borrowing the original image which was shared on March 21.

Conclusion:

To sum up, the Viral Image is altered from the original image, the original image caption tells Cricketer Virat Kohli chilling Before the Jio Advertisement commences but not watching any politician Interview. This shows that in the age of social media, where false information can spread quickly, critical thinking and fact-checking are more important than ever.  It is crucial to check if something is real before sharing it, to avoid spreading false stories.

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