Overview
- Cert-In and the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C) said Wednesday that the campaign has been designated 'CRAFTY FALCON' and is actively using AI agents to attack payment and disbursement APIs.
- Authorities said the attackers use public agentic AI tools such as ARTEX, PentAGI, Cairn and CyberStrikeAI to find vulnerabilities, craft tailored exploits and run autonomous attack chains at machine speed.
- Incidents reported to date include multi-crore unauthorised transfers where funds are routed through mule accounts and quickly withdrawn by IMPS/NEFT, with attackers deleting logs to hinder investigations.
- The advisories order immediate steps from banks, NBFCs and fintechs including 24x7 monitoring, tighter API access controls, transaction limits and a six-hour incident reporting requirement to CERT-In and RBI via DAKSH.
- Regulators are increasing oversight and urging sector-wide stress tests, shared threat intelligence and defensive AI tools to reduce financial-stability risks and protect customers' accounts and data.