Crypto Firms Under Attack: AI-Assisted CRAFTY FALCON Exploits Systems to Steal Digital Assets

India’s Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) warned that an AI-assisted threat actor called CRAFTY FALCON is targeting banks, fintech companies, payment service providers, non-banking financial companies and cryptocurrency exchanges, stealing wallet keys and moving funds through victims’ payment and disbursement application programming interfaces (APIs). CERT-In said the campaign has persisted despite earlier warnings and remediation, with attackers re-targeting organizations whose fixes were incomplete and timing attacks for holidays, weekends and low-monitoring periods. The actor uses machine intelligence and publicly available AI-driven offensive tools to survey targets and operate at machine speed, CERT-In said. Investigators also found micro-value test transactions, including 1 INR ($0.011), used to validate unauthorized fund flows before larger transfers.