Photo: The National Archives (UK) / CC BY 3.0
India’s cyber defense agency has a warning for anyone who keeps money on a crypto exchange: the thieves breaking in these days may not be people at all.
The Indian Computer Emergency Response Team, known as CERT-In, said Wednesday that an AI-assisted hacking group it calls “CRAFTY FALCON” has escalated attacks on cryptocurrency exchanges, banks, lenders and payment companies, stealing wallet keys and draining funds. The agency first flagged the campaign in October, and this week explicitly added crypto exchanges to its target list, detailing how the attackers use artificial intelligence to overwhelm defenses.
The group “surveys its targets with machine intelligence, operates at machine speed and strikes by invoking the victim’s own payment and disbursement APIs,” CERT-In said. The attackers slip in through vulnerable apps, forgotten test environments and shared passwords, then use AI tools to write and refine attack scripts faster than any human team could. Some attacks are timed for weekends and holidays, when security desks are thinly staffed, and begin with small test transfers before the real theft.
The campaign is not theoretical. CERT-In said its financial-sector response team keeps receiving reports of successful break-ins, including from lenders and fintech firms that had already patched their systems after the first warning. Advisories issued Monday and Tuesday by CERT-In and the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre describe unauthorized fund transfers worth crores of rupees. In October, the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike said an unidentified attacker used one of the same AI tools named in India’s advisory, alongside Anthropic’s Claude Code and other AI models, to breach South Korean financial firms.
India did not name the exchanges hit or put a figure on total losses. The agency told financial firms to treat the campaign as “active and escalating,” keep security monitoring running around the clock, and add staff during weekends and holidays.
For anyone who keeps crypto on an exchange, the old advice suddenly matters more: turn on two-factor authentication, and don’t leave coins on any platform that you can’t afford to lose.
JBizNews Desk | NEW DELHI
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