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Censys finds 815 exposed Artex AI-hacking consoles linked to the ConnectWise breach

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The short version

Security firm Censys counted about 815 internet-exposed consoles of Artex, the open-source AI pentesting tool Microsoft and CrowdStrike tied to real breaches at ConnectWise and South Korean banks.

Censys finds 815 exposed Artex AI-hacking consoles linked to the ConnectWise breach

Censys scanned the open internet and counted about 815 exposed consoles of Artex, an open-source autonomous penetration-testing framework that attackers have already used to breach a South Korean bank and, through a separate supply-chain compromise, reach thousands of organizations' data inside Microsoft's cloud. Many of the consoles needed no login at all, so researchers could read live attack data rather than just infer it, per Censys.

What

Artex went up on GitHub on July 26, 2026, built by a developer known as Autumn-27 on top of their existing ScopeSentry recon tool. A Planner agent turns a stated goal into attack steps, Worker agents carry them out with tools like nmap, and the loop repeats until the target is breached, according to Censys's writeup. It plugs into Anthropic, OpenAI, or any OpenAI-compatible model.

Censys detected 1,465 hosts running an Artex console as of November 3. Two hosting blocks running identical templates, one with 493 hosts and one with 157, account for roughly 650 of those; strip them out and about 815 distinct deployments remain, per the same report. Microsoft attributed the ConnectWise Cloud Backup supply-chain breach to Storm-0940, a China-aligned group active since 2021 that used Artex to automate scanning and password spraying, attempting sign-ins against more than 2,250 tenants at up to 2,900 attempts per minute and reaching privileged cloud access in under three hours in some cases, per Microsoft's security blog. CrowdStrike separately reported on October 7 that a different, financially motivated actor ran Artex against a South Korean bank's loan-inquiry system and an employee mobile system, per CrowdStrike.

Open consoles turned attacker infrastructure into a readable crime scene

Because so many Artex consoles sit open, Censys could read what attackers left behind instead of guessing. Its researchers found 32 open directories on Artex hosts exposing lateral-movement kits, stagers, and implants; one directory held an operator's entire home folder, SSH keys and shell history included. The directory tied to the South Korean campaign had been sitting exposed since August 18, seven weeks before CrowdStrike's report went public. Censys's report adds that Artex's default console port, 8787, shipped with no authentication layered on top, which is the specific setting worth checking on any self-hosted AI agent framework, not just this one.

What to watch next

Autumn-27 posted on October 8 denying involvement in the attacks and said Artex would go closed-source going forward. The GitHub repository has since come down, but archived copies and at least one rebrand, ScopeWeaver, are still circulating, per Censys. If your organization self-hosts Artex, ScopeWeaver, or any similar agentic security or pentest tool, check its console authentication settings today. Artex shipped with no login by default, which is what let Censys, and anyone else who found a host first, read live attack data straight off it.

Sources