India Flags AI-Powered Hacking Crew as Seoul Tightens Exchange Security

India's cyber first responders say a hacking crew is actively hunting financial firms — crypto exchanges included — with AI help. The Computer Emergency Response Team, known as CERT-In, named the campaign CRAFTY FALCON and described the threat as active and ongoing.

The playbook leans on payment and disbursement APIs as the way in. According to tokenpost.com, some of the crypto-platform incidents tied to the campaign involved stolen wallet keys and funds drained straight out of wallets. That's a double punch: access to the pipes, then access to the coins.

Seoul is already moving. South Korea's Financial Services Commission met Nov. 2 and pushed exchanges toward holding more in cold storage, watching deposits and withdrawals around the clock, staffing up response teams, sharing intel faster and setting aside extra reserves. Local rules already force virtual asset service providers to keep at least 80% of customer assets in cold wallets.

The pressure follows a brutal week for Binance. The exchange said its hot wallets were compromised at about 4:05 p.m. ET on Oct. 29 — 20:05 UTC — affecting an estimated $6.3 billion in token assets. In an Oct. 30 update, Binance said roughly $3 billion had been frozen on-chain by then, a figure that doesn't settle the final net loss.

Then Washington pointed a finger. The FBI said on Oct. 31 that North Korea was behind the theft of more than $6 billion in virtual assets from Binance. Taken together with CERT-In's warning, the message to exchanges is blunt: the attackers are automating, and the perimeter is only as strong as the weakest API.