TORONTO, Canada, November 8, 2026 -- India's Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) has issued a critical warning that should change how every organisation thinks about AI in production. Advisory CIAD-2026-0058, released November 4 by CERT-In and its financial-sector unit CSIRT-Fin, names an AI-assisted threat actor, "CRAFTY FALCON", that is conducting an escalating campaign against banking, financial services and insurance entities across India.

According to the advisory, the actor surveys targets with machine intelligence, operates at machine speed, and steals funds by invoking the victims' own payment and disbursement APIs. The targets include non-banking financial companies, digital lenders, fintech platforms, payment aggregators, payment service providers, and cryptocurrency exchanges and virtual digital asset service providers. The advisory escalates an earlier October 9 warning, CIAD-2026-0046, about abuse of payment and disbursement APIs, and notes that CSIRT-Fin continues to receive reports of successful attacks, including against organisations that had already received restricted earlier advisories and carried out remediation. Attacks are frequently timed for holidays, weekends and other low-monitoring periods.

CERT-In attributes the activity to publicly available AI-driven offensive security frameworks, naming the ARTEX family of LLM-based tools, the PentAGI autonomous multi-agent penetration-testing system, the Cairn attack search engine, and the CyberStrike.AI framework. The campaign is a warning in two directions at once: attackers now use AI tooling to move at machine speed, and the systems they abuse are the trusted interfaces organisations built for their own operations.

"Attackers are no longer just writing phishing emails. They are running AI agents against your APIs, at machine speed, on weekends, while your team is offline," said Sarah Reid, Securetron. "The question every organisation should be asking is not whether AI is involved in the next attack, but whether the AI traffic in their own environment is identified, authorised, inspected and governed. If you cannot see what your agents are doing, you cannot stop what they should not do."

That governance gap is the problem Securetron's AI-FW is built to close. AI-FW is a self-hosted AI firewall and governance gateway that sits between an organisation's AI agents and the models they call. Every prompt and response is inspected in real time, with jailbreak and prompt-injection detection, PII masking, toxicity filtering and data-exfiltration blocking. Semantic intent analysis scores requests against natural-language policies, agents are authenticated with API keys, JWT, mTLS or Kerberos and governed by role-based access control, and rolling risk scores trigger automatic blocking. Every transaction lands in a metadata-only audit log, so security teams have full visibility without raw prompt or response content ever being persisted. The gateway is fail-closed by design: a scanner error or missing configuration blocks the request rather than forwarding it unfiltered.

The Crafty Falcon campaign shows why that control point matters. When offensive AI tooling is freely available and defenders still route agent traffic straight to model providers with no inspection, no identity check and no audit trail, the attacker holds the speed advantage. A gateway that inspects, governs and audits agent traffic does not stop payment-API abuse on its own, but it closes the equivalent gap on the AI side: ungoverned agents, unregistered models, leaked credentials and policy drift, all visible on one dashboard before anything sensitive leaves the building.

AI-FW's Community Edition is free to use, with 10 billion tokens per rolling 30 days and no credit card required, and runs entirely inside the customer's own environment, on premises or in their cloud, so traffic never needs to leave their network.

About Securetron

Securetron builds AI-FW, a self-hosted AI firewall and governance gateway for AI agents and LLM backends, and PKI Trust Manager, an enterprise certificate lifecycle management platform. Securetron is based in Toronto, Canada. Learn more at https://aifw.io and https://securetron.net.

Press Contact

Sarah Reid
Securetron
1 Yonge St, Toronto, ON M5E 1E6, Canada
+1 (438) 927-8036
[email protected]
https://aifw.io