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…