The Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) flagged AI asymmetry as a key risk to the BSFI and payments ecosystem in its Digital Threat Report 2025-26, warning that offensive capabilities of frontier AI models are scaling faster than regulatory, defensive and operational frameworks designed to contain them.
India’s BFSI sector suffered 2.9 million cyber attacks in 2025, increasing over 2x from 1.4 million in 2021.
The report, copy of which is with MediaNama, points to two specific instances over the last 12 months to demonstrate how AI tools have automated significant parts of the cyber threat landscape.
- November 2025: Anthropic disclosed GTG-1002, where a Chinese-linked cybercriminal group used its Claude AI tool to target 30 companies globally. AI carried out up to 90% of the operation, in what was described as the first large-scale cyberespionage campaign largely run by an AI system.
- April 2026: Claude Mythos Preview autonomously discovered over 23,000 vulnerabilities across more than 1,000 open-source projects, out of which 1,752 were high- or critical-severity vulnerabilities.
CERT-In released its first advisory on AI threats in 2023, flagging that AI models could generate malicious code and phishing content.
Cyberattacks are becoming systemic: AI moves adversaries from manual, specialist operations to repeatable, automated attack pipelines, the report says.
- Vulnerability discovery, exploit chaining, and payload delivery are getting industrialised more like software manufacturing than tradecraft.
- GTG-1002 demonstrated this directly: the agent scaled, firing thousands of requests per second across roughly 30 organisations, including financial institutions.
AI is changing cyberattack economics: AI makes targeted campaigns cheaper to run, increasing the likelihood of a probe into any given organisation.
- Ransomware groups, which previously relied on buying exploits (master keys) from brokers to break into the systems of their targets, can now generate them independently using AI, at a fraction of cost.
- Frontier models have demonstrated autonomous vulnerability discovery across operating systems, browsers, and, directly relevant to digital asset operations, smart contracts, where frontier models produced working attacks against 207 of 405 historical smart contract exploits, totaling $550 million in simulated stolen funds.
Three types of AI-driven attacks that are already happening in BFSI
1. Parallel, multi vector campaigns: Hackers are using AI to launch massive, simultaneous attacks against a bank’s internal network, employee emails, cloud systems, and third-party vendors.
“Incident response built on sequential attack assumptions is structurally unprepared,” the Digital Threat Report 2025-26 said.
2. Discovery-to-exploit timeline is shrinking: The window between a hacker discovering a vulnerability and actually exploiting is compressing sharply. AI allows…
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