Microsoft assesses that the China-aligned actor Storm-0940 used the agentic AI penetration testing framework ARTEX to compromise the Microsoft 365 tenants of ConnectWise, then pivoted to its downstream customers. The campaign began in September 2026 and targeted hundreds of organizations worldwide across aerospace and defense, energy, fin…
Throughout October 2026, Wiz observed an actor using tooling associated with ARTEX, an open-source autonomous AI penetration-testing framework, against multiple IT and software vendors. The activity targeted identity providers (Okta, Entra ID, AWS Cognito) and Microsoft 365 integrations, with repeated attempts to bypass authentication, en…
A Chinese-speaking threat operator combined the agentic penetration-testing framework ARTEX with Claude Code, Codex and configurations requesting DeepSeek, GLM and Grok models to coordinate attacks on organizations worldwide. Recovered prompts dated August 4 to October 4, 2026 referenced targets in financial services, cryptocurrency, reta…
Microsoft attributed the recent supply chain compromise of the ConnectWise Cloud Backup application to Storm-0940, a China state-aligned actor. The actor used ARTEX, a Go-based agentic AI penetration testing framework, to automate reconnaissance, password spraying and OAuth application abuse at "machine speed" against hundreds of organiza…