#FactCheck: Viral AI video being shared online claiming Iran has destroyed Tel Aviv Ben Gurion Airport in an Iranian missile strike

Introduction:

CDR is a term that refers to Call detail records, The Telecom Industries holds the call details data of the users. As it amounts to a large amount of data, the telecom companies retain the data for a period of 6 months. CDR plays a significant role in investigations and cases in the courts. It can be used as pivotal evidence in court proceedings to prove or disprove certain facts & circumstances. Power of Interception of Call detail records is allowed for reasonable grounds and only by the authorized authority as per the laws. 

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Admissibility of CDR’s in Courts:

Call Details Records (CDRs) can be used as effective pieces of evidence to assist the court in ascertaining the facts of the particular case and inquiring about the commission of an offence, and according to the judicial pronouncements, it is made clear that CDRs can be used supporting or secondary evidence in the court. However, it cannot be the sole basis of the conviction. Section 92 of the Criminal Procedure Code 1973 provides procedure and empowers certain authorities to apply for court or competent authority intervention to seek the CDR. 

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Legal provisions to obtain CDR:

The CDR can be obtained under the statutory provisions of law contained in section 92 Criminal Procedure Code, 1973. Or under section 5(2) of Indian Telegraph Act 1885, read with rule 419(A) Indian Telegraph Amendment rule 2007. The guidelines were also issued in 2016 by Ministry of Ministry of Home Affairs for seeking Call details records (CDRs)

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How long is CDR stored with telecom Companies (Data Retention)

Call Data is retained by telecom companies for a period of 6 months. As the data amounts to high storage, almost several Petabytes per year, telecom companies store the call details data for a period of 6 months and archive the rest of it to tapes. 

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New Delhi 25Cr jewellery heist 

Recently, an incident took place where a 25-crore jewellery theft was carried out in a jewellery shop in Delhi, It was planned and executed by a man from Chhattisgarh. After committing the crime, the criminal went back to Chhattisgarh. It was a case of a 25Cr heist, and the police started their search & investigation. Police used technology and analysed the mobile numbers which were active at the crime scene. Delhi police used advanced software to analyse data. The police were able to trace the mobile number of thieves or suspects active at the crime scene. They discovered suspected contacts who were active within the range of the crime scene, and it helped in the arrest of the main suspects.  From around 5,000 mobile numbers active around the crime scene, police have used advanced software that analyses huge data, and then police found a number registered outside of Delhi.  The surveillance on the number has revealed that the suspected criminal has moved to the MP from Delhi, then moved further to Bhilai Chattisgarh. Police have successfully arrested the suspected criminal. This incident highlights how technology or call data can assist law enforcement agencies in investigating and finding the real culprits.

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Conclusion: 

CDR refers to call detail records retained by telecom companies for a period of 6 months, it can be obtained through lawful procedure and by competent authorities only. CDR can be helpful in cases before the court or law enforcement agencies, to assist the court and law enforcement agencies in ascertaining the facts of the case or to prove or disprove certain things. It is important to reiterated that unauthorized seeking of CDR is not allowed; the intervention of the court or competent authority is required to seek the CDR from the telecom companies. CDRs cannot be unauthorizedly obtained, and there has to be a directive from the court or competent authority to do so.

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References:

• https://indianlegalsystem.org/cdr-the-wonder-word/#:~:text=CDR%20is%20admissible%20as%20secondary,the%20Indian%20Evidence%20Act%2C%201872.
• https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/delhi/needle-in-a-haystack-how-cops-scanned-5k-mobile-numbers-to-crack-rs-25cr-heist/articleshow/104055687.cms?from=mdr
• https://www.ndtv.com/delhi-news/just-one-man-planned-executed-rs-25-crore-delhi-heist-another-thief-did-him-in-4436494

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Introduction

Delhi is Delhi-ing these days — whether it's the protest, the monsoon weather, the ongoing Monsoon Session of Parliament, metro disruptions, or just the general chaos of it all. Amid everything else, it's been over 30 days, starting from late June 2026, since the large public march organised in part by the group known as the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) converged near Parliament and on Jantar Mantar, and the city hasn't quite exhaled since. Like every large, fast-moving public event, it's come with a parallel flood online: photos, video clips, injury claims, and hot takes pouring in from participants, bystanders, and news outlets alike, all competing for your instagram scroll.

CyberPeace is a non-partisan digital trust and safety organisation, and what we do care about is the online information environment building up around the event — helping people spot misinformation and manipulated media, and encouraging a bit more caution before hitting "share" while rumours are moving faster than facts.

Delhi Police has already made a public appeal along similar lines, asking citizens against online spread of unverified rumours, noting that misinformation could make an already tense situation worse. This advisory builds on that, with some practical guidance for everyday citizens navigating the protest in light of social media.

Why This Matters Right Now

30 plus days in, the story has layers: the original hunger strike, the march itself, police action, viral clips, and now a second wave of commentary reacting to the reactions. Old footage resurfaces relabelled as "live." Numbers get inflated or deflated depending on who's sharing them. Screenshots go around stripped of context. The longer a protest runs, the murkier the timeline gets for anyone just scrolling past — which is exactly when misinformation finds the most room to spread.

The internet access was also restricted in parts of the city during the march, which has itself become a point of attention.

Given how much unverified information is already circulating, it's worth treating any single account of "what actually happened". The full picture will likely take time to emerge through credible reporting and scrutiny. 

Why This Moment Is Especially Prone to Misinformation

A few things are working together here to make mis-information spread faster than usual: Emotions are running high. Clashes, injuries, and confrontations naturally provoke strong reactions, and content that makes people angry or afraid tends to get shared quickly, with far less scrutiny than a calm, verified report would get.

There are information gaps. Reports of internet restrictions in parts of the city leave holes that get filled with speculation  or worse, old footage recycled and passed off as live updates.

The event is politically charged, which means competing narratives are synthetically being pushed from multiple directions, sometimes deliberately, making it harder to find neutral ground.

There's simply a huge volume of content. Thousands of clips and photos are being posted from one event, which makes it easy for unrelated or out-of-context material to slip in alongside the real thing. And then there's satire. Part of this movement has roots in political satire, so parody posts and meme accounts can easily be mistaken for genuine news if they're shared without context.

Common Types of Misleading Content to Watch For

A few patterns tend to show up again and again during events like this:

1. Old footage getting relabelled -  Photos or videos from a completely different protest, city, or even country, re-shared with a caption claiming it's from this event.
2. Clips taken out of context - A short moment, like a scuffle, shown without what happened right before or after it, changing how it reads.
3. Doctored images - Photos edited to add, remove, or exaggerate people, banners, injuries, or crowd size.
4. Fake official statements - Screenshots or graphics designed to look like they came from Delhi Police or a government department, but never actually issued.
5. Made-up casualty numbers - Figures shared with no real source, often vaguely attributed to "eyewitnesses."
6. Impersonation accounts - Handles designed to look like an official police or organiser account, sometimes just one letter off from the real one.
7. AI-generated visuals - Fully or partly synthetic images and videos showing scenes or crowds that never actually happened.
8. Rumours about shutdowns - Unverified claims about internet blackouts, road closures, or metro shutdowns that may be old, exaggerated, or simply untrue.

What Citizens Should Do:

• Pause before you forward. If a clip or claim makes you feel an instant, strong reaction, that's often the moment to slow down, not speed up.
• Check the timestamp and source. A five-day-old protest generates a lot of recycled footage. Reverse image/video search before assuming something is "breaking."
• Cross-check with more than one outlet. If only one account or page is reporting something dramatic, wait for corroboration.
• Be wary of numbers without sources. Injury counts, crowd sizes, and arrest figures are easy to exaggerate in either direction.
• Don't share unverified visuals of injuries or violence. Beyond accuracy concerns, this can also cause real harm to the people shown.
• When in doubt, don't repost — verify first, or simply sit it out.

How to Check a Claim Before You Share It:

A checklist goes a long way here:

1. Pause for a second. Content built to provoke a strong reaction is often designed to get past your defenses before you think twice. Just slowing down is itself protective.
2. Ask where it actually came from. Is this from a named journalist or outlet you can verify, or an anonymous forward with no clear origin? Messages that have clearly been passed around many times deserve extra suspicion.
3. Look for more than one source. If something significant is genuinely true, you'll usually find several independent, reputable outlets reporting it not just one channel or account.
4. Check the date and place. A quick reverse image or video search can tell you if a photo or clip has shown up online before, and what it was originally about.
5. Wait for official confirmation. For anything involving police action, injuries, or arrests, check verified accounts like Delhi Police, PIB, established news wires before treating a claim as settled fact.
6. Be suspicious of absolute language. Words like "confirmed," "breaking," or "exposed," used without naming any actual source, are a classic misinformation tell.
7. Look at the account, not just the post. New accounts with no history, or ones that only ever post about this one topic, deserve a second look.
8. Notice when something feels too satisfying. If a claim perfectly confirms what you already believed, that's exactly when you should slow down and check it; it's the content you're least likely to question on your own.

Reliable Fact-Checking Platforms and AI Detection Tools:

These resources can help you check specific claims, images, or videos:

1. For fact-checking: PIB Fact Check (factcheck.pib.gov.in) for anything involving government statements or orders; Alt News (altnews.in) and BOOM Live (boomlive.in), two independent Indian outlets that regularly cover protest- and politics-related claims.
2. For reverse image and video searches: Google Images, Google Lens, and TinEye can show you where a photo first appeared and in what context. InVID-WeVerify is a free browser plugin built for journalists that breaks videos into keyframes and lets you reverse-search individual frames.
3. For AI and synthetic media detection: Hive Moderation and Sensity AI offer public tools for checking images and video. Deepware Scanner focuses specifically on deepfake video. And most major platforms like Meta, YouTube, X are now labeling some AI-generated content automatically, though the absence of a label doesn't mean something's real.
4. A few terms worth knowing: A cheapfake is misleading media made with simple editing, cropping, slowing down, re-captioning rather than AI. These are still far more common than actual AI deepfakes. A deepfake is synthetic audio, video, or image content made with AI to convincingly show someone saying or doing something they didn't. Synthetic media is the broader umbrella term for any AI-generated content, whether or not it's being used to deceive.

Reporting Mechanism ~ If You Come Across Suspected Misinformation

Don't share it further, even to mock or correct it  any engagement can boost its reach. Check it against the fact-checking tools above before deciding what you think is true. Report it directly on the platform. If it falls  under the category of ‘Unlawful Content’ as per IT Rules, you can reach out to the grievance officer of the platform for removal of such content.

If it involves a government statement or order, send it to PIB Fact Check. If it looks like incitement, impersonation, extortion, or another cybercrime, report it to the National Cyber Crime Reporting Portal (cybercrime.gov.in) or call 1930. 

Further Steps & helplines

1. To file a cybercrime complaint: National Cyber Crime Reporting Portal - 1930 or cybercrime.gov.in 
2. To flag a fake government-related claim: PIB Fact Check - factcheck.pib.gov.in
3. For an on-ground emergency: dial 100 / 112 
4. CyberPeace Helpline: +91 9570000066 or helpline@cyberpeace.net
5. For fact check and debunking of any suspicious viral information, you can reach out to cyberpeace at helpline@cyberpeace.net
6. If this advisory feels useful, consider sharing it in family WhatsApp groups, community networks, or student and youth organisations as it helps slow the spread of unverified content when more people are thinking about it.

CyberPeace's Message to Citizens

Being first to share something isn't the same as being right. In moments like this, the most useful thing any of us can do is slow down, verify before sharing, be a little suspicious of content that confirms exactly what we already believed, and trust named, accountable sources over anonymous forwards. Misinformation during civic unrest doesn't just mislead people; it can raise tensions, put individuals at risk, and chip away at trust in both the media and the institutions meant to maintain public order.Our goal is simply to help people navigate the information around it a little more safely and critically.

Conclusion

Protests and public unrest always generate a flood of information, and not all of it will be accurate. What keeps that information environment healthy isn't any single authority or platform, it's the everyday habits of the people deciding, one post at a time, whether to check something or just pass it along.  Delhi's news cycle will keep moving, and this advisory isn't asking anyone to disengage from it. It's just a nudge to stay a little more careful with what you believe and what you pass on in this social media age. Pause. Verify. Scroll healthy. Stay CyberPeaceful.

References

1. https://rajkaran.in/delhi-police-urges-calm-amid-cjp-protest-warns-against-rumours-as-clashes-erupt-during-chalo-sansad-march
2. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/0kkSCYrjRGc
3. https://factcheck.pib.gov.in/
4. https://www.altnews.in/
5. https://www.boomlive.in/
6. https://www.vishvasnews.com/
7. https://www.factcrescendo.com/
8. https://cybercrime.gov.in/

Contributors

1. Neeraj Soni, Sr. Research Analyst, Policy & Advocacy, CyberPeace
2. Ritika Goswami, Intern - Policy & Advocacy, CyberPeace

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Introduction

In an era where organisations are increasingly interdependent through global supply chains, outsourcing and digital ecosystems, third-party risk has become one of the most vital aspects of enterprise risk management. The SolarWinds hack, the MOVEit vulnerabilities and recent software vendor attacks all serve as a reminder of the necessity to enhance Third-Party Risk Management (TPRM). As cyber risks evolve and become more sophisticated and as regulatory oversight sharpens globally, 2025 is a transformative year for the development of TPRM practices. This blog explores the top trends redefining TPRM in 2025, encompassing real-time risk scoring, AI-driven due diligence, harmonisation of regulations, integration of ESG, and a shift towards continuous monitoring. All of these trends signal a larger movement towards resilience, openness and anticipatory defence in an increasingly dependent world.

Real-Time and Continuous Monitoring becomes the Norm

The old TPRM methods entailed point-in-time testing, which typically was an annual or onboarding process. By 2025, organisations are shifting towards continuous, real-time monitoring of their third-party ecosystems. Now, authentic advanced tools are making it possible for companies to take a real-time pulse of the security of their vendors by monitoring threat indicators, patching practices and digital footprint variations. This change has been further spurred by the growth in cyber supply chain attacks, where the attackers target vendors to gain access to bigger organisations. Real-time monitoring software enables the timely detection of malicious activity, equipping organisations with a faster defence response. It also guarantees dynamic risk rating instead of relying on outdated questionnaire-based scoring.

AI and Automation in Risk Assessment and Due Diligence

Manual TPRM processes aren't sustainable anymore. In 2025, AI and machine learning are reshaping the TPRM lifecycle from onboarding and risk classification to contract review and incident handling. AI technology can now analyse massive amounts of vendor documentation and automatically raise red flags on potential issues. Natural language processing (NLP) is becoming more common for automated contract intelligence, which assists in the detection of risky clauses or liability gaps or data protection obligations. In addition, automation is increasing scalability for large organisations that have hundreds or thousands of third-party relationships, eliminating human errors and compliance fatigue. However, all of this must be implemented with a strong focus on security, transparency, and ethical AI use to ensure that sensitive vendor and organisational data remains protected throughout the process.

Risk Quantification and Business Impact Mapping

Risk scoring in isolation is no longer adequate. One of the major trends for 2025 is the merging of third-party risk with business impact analysis (BIA). Organisations are using tools that associate vendors to particular business processes and assets, allowing better knowledge of how a compromise of a vendor would impact operations, customer information or financial position. This movement has resulted in increased use of risk quantification models, such as FAIR (Factor Analysis of Information Risk), which puts dollar values on risks associated with vendors. By using the language of business value, CISOs and risk officers are more effective at prioritising risks and making resource allocations.

Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) enters into TPRM

As ESG keeps growing on the corporate agenda, organisations are taking TPRM one step further than cybersecurity and legal risks and expanding it to incorporate ESG-related factors. In 2025, organisations evaluate if their suppliers have ethical labour practices, sustainable supply chains, DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) metrics and climate impact disclosures. This growth is not only a reputational concern, but also a third-party non-compliance with ESG can now invoke regulatory or shareholder action. ESG risk scoring software and vendor ESG audits are becoming components of onboarding and performance evaluations.

Shared Assessments and Third-Party Exchanges

With the duplication of effort by having multiple vendors respond to the same security questionnaires, the trend is moving toward shared assessments. Systems such as the SIG Questionnaire (Standardised Information Gathering) and the Global Vendor Exchange allow vendors to upload once and share with many clients. This change not only simplifies the due diligence process but also enhances data accuracy, standardisation and vendor experience. In 2025, organisations are relying more and more on industry-wide vendor assurance platforms to minimise duplication, decrease costs and maximise trust.

Incident Response and Resilience Partnerships

Another trend on the rise is bringing vendors into incident response planning. In 2025, proactive organisations address major vendors as more than suppliers but as resilience partners. This encompasses shared tabletop exercises, communication procedures and breach notification SLAs. With the increasing ransomware attacks and cloud reliance, organisations are now calling for vendor-side recovery plans, RTO and RPO metrics. TPRM is transforming into a comprehensive resilience management function where readiness and not mere compliance takes centre stage.

Conclusion

Third-Party Risk Management in 2025 is no longer about checklists and compliance audits; it's a dynamic, intelligence-driven and continuous process. With regulatory alignment, AI automation, real-time monitoring, ESG integration and resilience partnerships leading the way, organisations are transforming their TPRM programs to address contemporary threat landscapes. As digital ecosystems grow increasingly complex and interdependent, managing third-party risk is now essential. Early adopters who invest in tools, talent and governance will be more likely to create secure and resilient businesses for the AI era.

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References

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‍- https://finance.ec.europa.eu/publications/digital-operational-resilience-act-dora_en

- https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/nis2-directive

- https://www.meity.gov.in/data-protection-framework

- https://securityscorecard.com

- https://sharedassessments.org/sig/

- https://www.fairinstitute.org/fair-model 

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