Why India’s New Cyber Alert Should Worry Every Crypto Exchange

Trading platforms have a fresh threat to deal with. India’s national response team, CERT-In, says a group it now tracks as CRAFTY FALCON is running a growing campaign that relies on AI to break into financial companies, and crypto exchanges are now officially among its targets.

How This AI Hacking Campaign Targets Crypto Platforms

Instead of building each attack by hand, the group uses AI to study its victims, write exploit scripts and tweak them quickly. It also takes apart application code to craft custom exploits, then uses the victim’s own payment and disbursement tools to move money out. The way in was usually a weak app or a test environment left exposed online. Shared logins and access tokens then opened the door to live systems and cloud servers.

Warnings and Advice for Security Teams

CERT-In named no exchanges and gave no loss figures, though some firms were hit again after cleaning up. It wants constant monitoring, extra staff and lower alert thresholds on quiet days. CrowdStrike described a similar AI assisted breach of South Korean financial firms in October. Solana Foundation’s Michael Coates says defenders need the strongest AI tools, and TRM Labs’ Ari Redbord says one audit cannot keep pace with attackers.