Indian banks, non-banking financial companies, fintech platforms and payment service providers have been told to brace for a new class of cyberattack, one in which criminals use artificial intelligence to break into payment systems and move money at machine speed.
The warning comes from the National Cybercrime Threat Analysis Unit of the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C), which issued an advisory dated November 3, 2026, in coordination with CERT-In under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology. According to a report by The Federal, individual cases have already involved unauthorised transactions worth multiple crores.
What the Advisory Says
The document, titled 'AI-assisted financially motivated cyberattacks on NBFCs and fintech platforms', describes a pattern in which attackers deploy AI agents to speed up intrusions into financial infrastructure.
The core concern is the combination of exposed digital systems, automated money flows and agentic AI. Together, these can sharply increase both how fast fraud happens and how much money is lost before anyone notices.
How the Attacks Unfold
Attackers typically gain a foothold by exploiting unpatched software or misconfigured servers and IT systems that are reachable from the internet. Customer-facing portals and complaint-management tools can also serve as entry points.
Once inside, they go after automated fund disbursement systems and the specialised APIs institutions use for payments and transfers. The advisory states that the use of an agentic AI framework "makes the attack possible at machine speed."
Stolen funds are then pushed to mule accounts spread across multiple banks and quickly moved onward or withdrawn through IMPS and NEFT. Attackers may also erase records to cover their tracks, complicating later investigations.
Why Payment APIs Are a Prime Target
APIs are the connective tissue of modern finance, linking lenders, payment platforms and other digital services for tasks such as loan disbursements, vendor payments and transfers.
Weak authentication, excessive access privileges, poorly secured endpoints and forgotten interfaces can all open the door to misuse. When an automated disbursement system sits behind that door, a single compromise can translate into large-value transactions within minutes.
Recommended Defences
The advisory urges institutions to keep a full inventory of payment-related APIs and shut down old, unused or test interfaces. It also calls for closer coordination between security leadership, transaction monitoring teams and IT departments.
Other measures include watching for abnormal transaction speeds and sudden shifts in beneficiary profiles or volumes, flagging access-token failures from non-whitelisted IP addresses, hardening customer-facing systems, and reviewing architecture to limit lateral movement after a breach.
Firms are also told to make sure KYC and approval checks are completed before any funds are released, and to run authorised red-team exercises that simulate machine-speed attacks. The advisory points to two earlier CERT-In notices, CIAD-2026-0046 on payment and disbursement API exploitation and CIAD-2026-0049 on AI agents as attack vectors.
Six-Hour Reporting Window
Beyond prevention, the advisory stresses speed of disclosure. Cyber incidents must be reported to CERT-In within six hours of being noticed, and banks and NBFCs must also file with the Reserve Bank of India's DAKSH portal within the same window.
For bulk reporting of fraudulent transactions, NBFCs and fintech firms can approach I4C through the Citizen Financial Cyber Fraud Reporting and Management System on the National Cybercrime Reporting Portal, which can help freeze defrauded funds where possible.
What It Means for India's Fintech Sector
The warning underlines that the risk for financial firms now goes well beyond data breaches. A successful attack on internal payment infrastructure could bring direct losses, operational disruption, regulatory scrutiny and reputational harm.
For payment aggregators, gateways, digital lenders and other fintech operators, the takeaway is practical: access controls, transaction monitoring and fund-release safeguards need to be able to detect and halt suspicious movements before money leaves the system, at the same speed attackers now operate.
Source: The Federal
