This advisory is an update to CERT-In Advisory CIAD-2026-0046 dated 09 October 2026 on Threat Actors Exploiting Payment and Disbursement APIs for Unauthorized Fund Transfers in BFSI Entities. Continued analysis of incidents reported by affected entities including non-banking financial companies (NBFCs), digital lending platforms, fintech entities, payment aggregators, payment service providers and cryptocurrency exchanges / virtual digital asset service providers has revealed a significant escalation of this campaign. Computer Security Incident Response Team - Finance (CSIRT-Fin) under CERT-In has designated the threat actor responsible for this campaign as "CRAFTY FALCON": an AI-assisted financial threat actor that surveys its targets with machine intelligence, operates at machine speed and strikes by invoking the victim's own payment and disbursement APIs.

The threat is active and ongoing. CSIRT-Fin continues to receive reports of successful attacks, including from NBFCs and fintech entities that had already received the earlier restricted (TLP:AMBER) advisories and had undertaken remediation. 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. All BFSI entities are strongly advised to treat this campaign as an immediate and continuing threat.

Analysis has identified the use of multiple publicly available AI-driven offensive security tools against affected entities including the "ARTEX" family of LLM-based, "PentAGI" autonomous multi-agent AI penetration testing system and the "Cairn" attack search engine, in addition to the "CyberStrikeAI" framework. These tools execute complete attack chains autonomously at machine speed, generate and refine large numbers of tailored attack scripts in rapid succession and adapt their payloads based on target responses. The supporting attack infrastructure rotates IP addresses within hours to days; infrastructure fingerprints and detailed detection rules have been shared with entities through the restricted advisories.

• Cloud infrastructure of entities targeted including compute, serverless and management services with cloud management services (such as AWS Systems Manager and Lambda) abused to execute commands and deploy malicious files, blending malicious activity into legitimate cloud management channels.
  
  
• Internet-exposed non-production environments (UAT/staging/testing) used as entry points, followed by movement to production environments using shared credentials, tokens or network paths.
  
  
• Application codebases reverse-engineered by the threat actor to develop tailored exploits; unauthorized API calls subsequently initiated using altered/modified application packages, defeating controls that assumed only the legitimate client application would call the APIs.
  
  
• IP allow-listing bypassed by originating traffic from whitelisted third-party fetcher IP pools (such as content-acceleration and app-store review fetchers); any Internet user can cause such shared fetcher services to fetch arbitrary URLs.
  
  
• Micro-value test transactions (such as Rs. 1) performed to validate unauthorized fund flows before executing large-value transfers.
  
  
• Merchant settlement APIs of payment aggregators exploited or abused to move funds.
  
  
• Newly published vulnerabilities exploited as soon as they become public, including file-upload and deserialization exploit chains leading to web shells in PHP and Node.js applications.

1. Issuance of digital signature certificates and eSign services, regulated by the Controller of Certifying Authorities (CCA) under MeitY.
   
   
2. Issuance of digital certificates trusted by major browsers and operating systems, used to secure websites, software and online communications.

The second function is international in nature and operates under global trust framework. It is governed by international standards and subject to independent audits, including Web Trust audits conducted by BDO International Limited.

The affected private keys were generated with insufficient cryptographic randomness. The P-384 elliptic-curve private keys had values smaller than 256 and could be recovered almost instantly from their corresponding public keys. The weakness arose during key generation and does not indicate a vulnerability in the P-384 cryptographic algorithm itself. Whereas eMudhra has stated in its public press release, "A flaw in the key generation ceremony caused a wrap / unwrap step to produce a second set of weak keys along side the original strong keys. The weak keys were the ones published to the browser root stores."

• "Guidelines regarding AI-Accelerated Vulnerability Protection and Response Requirements for Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs), and Technology Providers"