Open-source pen-test tool Artex adopted by threat actors for automated attacks
Developer Autumn-27 released Artex, an open-source multiagent AI penetration-testing framework written in Go, on GitHub in July. By late summer and fall, multiple threat actors were using the tool — which can brute-force passwords, dump databases and abuse APIs — to automate attacks at high speed; Microsoft observed an AI agent go from scanning GitHub for secrets to exfiltrating data from an Azure Key Vault in five minutes. The creator deleted the original repository in late October citing abuse, but forks remain active.