According to The Hacker News, CERT-In describes ongoing activity by a group it tracks as Crafty Falcon, targeting banks, insurers, fintechs, payment providers and crypto exchanges in India using open tools such as ARTEX, PentAGI, Cairn and CyberStrikeAI. The agency says the tools run complete attack chains autonomously and adapt to target responses. The attackers steal payment-gateway and partner-bank API credentials, trigger fund transfers from inside the victim's own infrastructure and delete logs. CERT-In also published AI security auditing guidelines, which require, among other things, human approval for consequential agent actions.
Separately, a researcher using the alias Badbyte found that a GitHub copy of ARTEX changed a single line in its configuration to pull a backdoored Docker image, giving anyone who knows a secret marker an unauthenticated root shell. The image was downloaded about 9,000 times, and between November 2 and 4, 62 internet-facing ARTEX consoles were found serving the compromised build, 26 of them in the US.
Anyone who installed ARTEX from Docker Hub should assume the server is compromised: take it offline, rotate every password and key it held and rebuild it. ARTEX has already been linked to the attacks on WorkOS and Chainstack that we reported last week.