Hundreds of Artex AI hacking tools found publicly exposed to the web

Security researchers have found hundreds of copies of an AI hacking tool called Artex left open to the internet, TechCrunch reports. Cybersecurity firm Censys says it identified more than 800 separate deployments that could be reached from the web without a password.

Artex is a Chinese-made, open source tool for autonomous penetration testing, meaning it probes computer systems for weaknesses with little human involvement. It was released publicly in July and has since been linked to several cyberattacks. Because it is free to run on one's own servers, it has become popular with people who cannot get access to the most advanced security models from Anthropic or OpenAI.

Censys researcher Silas Cutler said not every exposed instance is malicious and that many belong to authorized testers. But the software does not need to be reachable from the internet, and the open systems also expose attack tools, including implants used to keep hidden access to a victim's network.

Security companies have tied Artex to attacks on South Korea's finance industry in September, which CrowdStrike attributed to a Chinese-speaking hacker, and to an October attack on IT support company ConnectWise that let Chinese-linked hackers spy on thousands of organizations. Many of the attacks relied on simple weaknesses such as weak passwords and missing multi-factor authentication.

Artex has since said it will go closed-source and limit new releases to paying customers, though dozens of copies of its code remain on code-sharing sites.