Microsoft: China-aligned Storm-0940 used the agentic AI framework ARTEX to automate attacks, including the ConnectWise breach

Microsoft Threat Intelligence says China state-aligned Storm-0940 used ARTEX, an open-source multi-agent AI penetration-testing framework, to automate attacks on hundreds of organisations across industries, and assesses it was behind the ConnectWise Cloud Backup supply-chain compromise. Using app access already granted to ConnectWise, the actor tried to sign in to more than 2,250 Microsoft 365 tenants at 2,900 attempts per minute, in some cases reaching privileged cloud access within three hours. Microsoft says its own systems were not compromised.