Chinese hackers use ARTEX AI in attacks on more than 200 organizations

Chinese threat actor Vapor Panda used ARTEX AI, an open-source, multi-agent penetration-testing framework, in attacks against more than 200 organizations across 14 countries, according to researchers at CrowdStrike. The operation began on October 17 and targeted government ministries, telecommunications providers, and organizations in pharmaceutical, semiconductor, defense, nuclear, and financial sectors.

CrowdStrike says Vapor Panda compromised at least nine organizations and conducted password-spraying and credential-scanning activity against at least 12 other high-value targets. Confirmed victims include telecommunications providers in the United States and Belgium, government organizations in Greece, the Middle East, and Latin America, and pharmaceutical firms in the U.S.

In an attack on a Greek government entity, the AI agents forged an administrator token and accessed mailboxes using authentication keys from a 2022 mail-server directory export, researchers said. The attackers also used DeepSeek and an unidentified commercial language model to coordinate planning and worker agents across multiple intrusions. CrowdStrike says operators issued instructions in Chinese and intervened at critical decision points.

The agents performed reconnaissance, exploited vulnerabilities, deployed web shells, obtained credentials, and pursued alternative attack paths. Operators instructed them to skip Windows machines protected by CrowdStrike Falcon and focus on unprotected hosts. In one intrusion, the agents consumed more than 1.4 billion input tokens, researchers believe.

CrowdStrike also found that Vapor Panda deployed BLOODALCHEMY, a backdoor active since 2023, against government entities in Latin America and the Middle East. ARTEX AI was initially released as open source, but its creators later made it proprietary after it was used in real-world attacks, including a campaign against South Korean financial institutions.