> Threat actor targets Indian fintechs on weekends when defenders aren’t watching

India’s Computer Emergency Response Team has warned the nation’s financial services industry of a “significant escalation” in attacks by what it describes as an “AI-assisted financial threat actor” that has re-targeted victims after they flubbed remediation efforts. CERT-IN first detected the attacks in October and issued advisory in which it warned digital lending platforms, fintech entities, payment service providers, and wallet operators that attackers were targeting internet-facing applications, exposed APIs and privileged endpoints. If the attackers found a way in, they tried to use payment APIs to steal money. On Thursday, the CERT published an update in which it said it continues to hear of successful attacks, including from outfits that tried to remediate their systems after earlier incidents. “The same entities have been deliberately re-targeted, including after incomplete remediation and attacks have been timed to coincide with holidays, weekends and other low-monitoring windows to delay detection and response,” the CERT warned. CERT-IN has decided the attackers need a name and chose “CRAFTY FALCON.” The security org has also revealed that the crew uses AI-enhanced tools including the ARTEX pen-testing tool, the Cairn attack search engine, and the CyberStrikeAI framework – all of which have been linked to users who appear to speak Chinese. CRAFTY FALCON’s tactics see it go looking for internet-exposed environments used for testing or development, where it finds artefacts such as shared credentials, tokens, or network paths that help it move into production systems. If it gets in, the crew re-writes victims’ applications so they do things like make unauthorized API calls. Victims’ defenses assume that only legitimate apps would call those APIs, so activity conducted by the re-written apps aren’t flagged as an attack. Even if victims suspect an attack, they have a lot to cope with because CERT-IN says CRAFTY FALCON creates many “functionally identical variants refined in rapid succession; a pattern consistent with AI-generated code and iterative AI-assisted development.” The crew also quickly exploits newly discovered vulnerabilities to keep its attacks fresh. Once it gets a toehold, the criminal crew makes tiny payments of about $0.01 to test if its attacks work. If those transfers work, CRAFTY FALCON makes larger payments. When the target is a cryptocurrency exchange or virtual digital asset service provider, the crew steals wallet keys and empties cryptocurrency wallets. Vendors of observability tools will be warming up their Indian sales teams today, because CERT-IN’s advice to Indian businesses includes improving their ability to log events, monitor for anomalies in real time, and send alerts. It also urged keeping test environments off the internet, and restricting access to cloud resources because CRAFTY FALCON is fond of using them to run its attacks. CERT-IN also warns that the attacks are “active and escalating” and therefore worthy of 24x7 monitoring. Interestingly, the CERT’s advisory mentions attacks on “entities” across banking, financial services, and insurance, but only names the kind of businesses mentioned above as having reported attacks. The Register points this out because India is home to literally thousands of banks, many of them small operations that sometimes lack basic infosec protections. CRAFTY FALCON therefore has a target-rich environment in India should it choose to expand its activities. ®