New AI hacking campaign targets Indian fintech firms during festive period

Cyber Attacks

An artificial intelligence hacking campaign is currently attacking Indian financial technology companies, according to a warning from the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team. The agency issued an advisory on Wednesday, November 4, stating that the threat is active and ongoing. Non-banking financial companies, digital lending platforms, payment aggregators, and cryptocurrency exchanges are among the affected organisations. The hacking group behind these attacks is named 'Crafty Falcon'. The group uses artificial intelligence tools to study targets and launch attacks by using the victims' own payment and disbursement application programming interfaces at very high speeds.

Tools and Tactics

The attackers are using publicly available artificial intelligence tools for offensive security. These include a multi-agent penetration testing platform called ARTEX, an autonomous multi-AI agent penetration testing system named PentAGI, an attack search engine called Cairn, and the CyberStrikeAI framework. These tools run complete attack chains automatically, create tailored attack scripts quickly, and change their internet protocol addresses within hours or days to avoid detection.

Background and Context

This warning follows an earlier alert from October 9 about cyber attacks on fintech firms using exposed software flaws and stolen login details. The agency noted that attackers timed the recent campaign to coincide with the festive period to take advantage of reduced monitoring. Entities that previously patched security flaws have been targeted again due to incomplete fixes. Meanwhile, the agency recently gained access to an advanced artificial intelligence model named Claude Mythos from Anthropic to help find and fix software vulnerabilities in controlled tests.