ISLAMABAD(Reuters): Two intelligence rivals picked the same target and neither knew the other was already inside. Cybersecurity firm SentinelOne says hacking groups tied separately to China and India spent more than two years quietly probing Pakistan’s police networks, running parallel espionage campaigns that converged on the same institutions without any apparent coordination between Beijing and New Delhi.
The Balochistan police bore the brunt of the intrusions. Attackers reached into the force’s network equipment, its web servers, and several of its online platforms, including the Complaint Management System that ordinary citizens use to register grievances and track cases.
Pakistan Police Cyberattack Widens
Researchers tracked the campaigns from February 2024 to April 2026, giving attackers ample time to conduct patient surveillance instead of quick, one-off intrusions. According to Aleksandar Milenkoski, the lead threat researcher at SentinelOne, the overlap itself is what the story is all about, because having two separate espionage entities targeting the same law enforcement organization shows how valuable an asset these agencies see such institutions to be.
Sources confirmed that the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa police also came under sustained pressure. The force insists no core system, network, or critical application ever fell to the attackers. But it conceded something narrower: during last year’s spike in Pakistan–India tensions, attempted intrusions against KP police climbed sharply, and in one isolated case, hackers did get their hands on a working set of login credentials belonging to an end user.
China and India Had Different Goals
Both the Islamabad police and the Punjab Safe Cities Authority, which operates the surveillance network and infrastructure across the largest cities in Punjab, have been listed as targets. Both the Punjab Safe Cities Authority and the Ministry of Interior of Pakistan did not respond to inquiries.
Motive splits cleanly along national lines, according to the findings. China’s interest appears tied to protecting its own nationals, who have repeatedly come under deadly attack while working on projects across Pakistan in recent years. India’s interest traces more directly to bilateral hostility and a desire to map Pakistan’s broader security posture.
Beijing pushed back hard against any suggestion of state involvement. Liu Chang, spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, said China opposes all forms of cyberattacks and does not permit any actor to launch them from Chinese soil or infrastructure. New Delhi offered no response at all the Indian Embassy in Washington stayed silent when asked about the findings.
What emerges is an uncomfortable picture for Islamabad: the agencies meant to track threats from across its borders and coordinate the state’s response to them became the threat’s own entry point, watched simultaneously by the two governments Pakistan trusts least one an ally investing billions in the country, the other a nuclear-armed neighbour it has fought four wars against.
