A China state-backed threat group is using ARTEX, the automated agentic AI penetration testing framework, to achieve remarkable speed, scale and success in a campaign that already compromised about 140 sensitive targets in 11 days, according to CrowdStrike. 

The threat group, which CrowdStrike tracks as Vapor Panda, targeted more than 200 organizations in at least 14 countries since Oct. 17, the security company said in a threat report Thursday. Targets and confirmed victims include foreign ministries, a European country’s presidency and prime minister’s office, defense and intelligence agencies; 19 U.S.-based organizations in the pharmaceutical, semiconductor, defense, nuclear and financial sectors; and telecom providers in the United States, Belgium and the Philippines. 

CrowdStrike told CyberScoop about 70% of Vapor Panda’s targets were confirmed compromised or had evidence indicating moderate confidence of a successful intrusion. 

Vapor Panda’s use of ARTEX, paired with DeepSeek, allowed it to accomplish more tasks with shocking speed — requests occurring as often as every 10 seconds — and pursue multiple attack paths concurrently. 

“This is the first time that we’re seeing an agentic adversary nation-state threat actor at this scale, and I think that this is probably, unfortunately, something we’ll see more of,” Adam Meyers, senior vice president of counter adversary operations at CrowdStrike, told CyberScoop.

Hands-on-keyboard activity tracked by CrowdStrike for the past 15 years typically involved up to 40 commands per hour. “Now, with ARTEX, we could see it exceed 1,500 commands an hour,” Meyers said.

“If you diversify that across 200 targets, it costs them very little to run a mass-exploitation campaign and drop a websell,” he added. “They can hit more targets in a faster period of time.”

Vapor Panda’s broad-access campaign, which remains active, has targeted think tanks and government agencies spanning defense, justice, finance and diplomacy.

“I would characterize it as a diverse operational mission that tends to focus on sectors and geographies that Beijing considers economically or politically important,” Meyers said.

The active campaign attributed to Vapor Panda is separate from the ARTEX activity Microsoft Threat Intelligence attributed to Storm-0940 earlier this month, including a supply-chain attack targeting ConnectWise customers. 

Adversarial use of AI is relatively new, yet also quickly becoming the new normal, Meyers said. “We’re scrambling because we’re seeing so many of these agentic adversaries.”

Agentic AI use for malicious purposes is growing month-over-month at a rate of almost threefold. CrowdStrike observed roughly 45 agentic adversary attacks in September and it’s already at 126 for October, and climbing.

Adversarial use of agentic AI isn’t an intractable problem, but rather another reminder that organizations need visibility into their endpoints, identities and cross-domain capabilities, Meyers said. 

These attacks aren’t showcasing anything new, “it’s just doing it at a speed and scale that we’re unaccustomed to,” he said. “It’s not hopeless, but you’ve got to take action. You can’t put your head in the sand.”

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Microsoft researchers attributed the recent supply-chain attack targeting ConnectWise customers’ Microsoft 365 environments to a China-state aligned threat actor it tracks as Storm-0940.

“As early as September 2026, Storm-0940 used the agentic AI penetration testing framework ARTEX to automate attacks targeting hundreds of organizations globally across a broad range of industries,” Microsoft Security Research wrote in a blog post Wednesday. 

The nation-state group, which has been active since 2021, targeted organizations in aerospace and defense, automotive, chemicals, energy, financial services, government, legal, manufacturing, media, military, semiconductors, software, technology, think tanks and non-profits. 

Storm-0940 initiated a widespread, but ultimately unsuccessful, password-spraying campaign immediately preceding the compromise of ConnectWise’s Cloud Backup service. During a four-day stretch ending Oct. 14, Storm-0940 targeted 327 Microsoft 365 and Exchange Online accounts across eight organizations, researchers said.

During that short campaign, Microsoft observed more than 151,000 failed logon attempts, peaking at 2,900 failures per minute. Storm-0940 set its sights on ConnectWise the next day, using AI agents and the same malicious infrastructure to compromise a series of ConnectWise Cloud Backup customers’ Microsoft 365 environments. 

Storm-0940 gained significant advantages in the ConnectWise supply-chain campaign by using ARTEX to accelerate scanning, conduct password-spray attacks and abuse OAuth applications in downstream victims, according to Microsoft. 

“In some of these environments, the AI agents (on behalf of the threat actor) progressed beyond authentication to Microsoft Graph and directory operations, including reconnaissance, application credential modifications to establish persistence, and changes involving identities, groups, and privileged roles,” researchers wrote. “Microsoft identified multiple customer environments with evidence of follow-on activity, highlighting how a compromised third-party application with high privileges could provide access beyond its originally intended purpose.”

Microsoft Threat Intelligence said multiple threat actors from various regions are using ARTEX to strengthen capabilities and speed up the tempo of attacks. 

The open-source penetration testing framework works with any AI model to automate various offensive security workflows, the company said. “ARTEX is a system of LLM-driven agents that run an autonomous penetration test from reconnaissance through data exfiltration with little needed human interaction.”

In the ConnectWise campaign, Microsoft said “Storm-0940 used ARTEX to reach more than 2,250 tenants at 2,900 sign-in attempts per minute, a pace that leaves defenders with little time to detect and respond.”

Microsoft did not say how many customers were compromised, adding that successful authentication doesn’t necessarily indicate Storm-0940 accessed or stole data. Yet, researchers said the threat group’s AI agents could also gain persistent access and establish backdoors by modifying credentials in targeted victims’ environments. 

ConnectWise, which temporarily shut down services Saturday in the wake of the attacks, said it began restoring services in phases Wednesday. The company advised customers to keep connections disabled and said it expects the recovery process to take several days.

“Since early October, a wave of AI-driven cyberattacks has been ongoing,” Igor Tsyganskiy, executive vice president at Microsoft, wrote in a LinkedIn post Wednesday. The ConnectWise supply-chain attack is just “one of many,” he added.

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