ARTEX AI Agents Supercharged the ConnectWise Supply Chain Attack

Microsoft says the recent supply chain compromise of the ConnectWise Cloud Backup application was the work of China-aligned group Storm-0940. To accelerate the operation, the attackers leaned on ARTEX — a Go-based agentic AI penetration-testing framework that was taken closed-source after being abused against South Korean financial institutions.

According to the company, since September 2026 the tool has run at "machine speed," automating reconnaissance, password spraying, and OAuth application abuse across hundreds of organizations worldwide. Targets span aerospace and defense, automotive, chemicals, energy, financial services, government, legal, manufacturing, media, military, semiconductors, software, technology, and think tanks and non-profits.

Speed as a weapon

Because AI agents work around the clock and probe several breach paths at once, the time from picking a target to gaining privileged access collapsed — in several cases to under three hours. ARTEX let the attackers authenticate through applications that had already been granted access, so no interactive user sign-in was required.

Microsoft first detailed Storm-0940 in November 2024; the group is believed to have been active since at least 2021 and previously used a botnet called Quad7 for stealthy password-spray attacks. It establishes persistence by adding credentials to existing OAuth applications inside cloud infrastructures.

The incident timeline

Between October 10 and 14, 2026, infrastructure at 144.172.64[.]99 ran an automated cross-tenant password-spray campaign against 327 accounts across eight organizations, at up to 2,900 sign-in attempts per minute. Microsoft logged more than 151,000 failed logons; the activity peaked on October 11 with over 111,000 failures in a single day, and 48 accounts drew more than 1,000 failures each. No successful authentication occurred during this window.

That changed on October 15, when the AI agents seized the identities of multiple ConnectWise cloud applications and used them to authenticate into customer environments — trading on the trust those apps already held within each tenant. In some cases the agents went beyond authentication into Microsoft Graph and directory operations: reconnaissance, application-credential changes to establish persistence, and modifications to identities, groups, and privileged roles. Such changes can linger as a backdoor even after the original compromise is remediated.

Storm-0940 is not the only ARTEX user: Microsoft has seen actors from multiple regions weaponize the framework. ConnectWise said the campaign reaches well beyond any single company and warned that MSPs are especially exposed, since one trusted connection can open the door to many clients. The company temporarily shut down services and is restoring them in phases.

Source: The Hacker News