Hacking on Autopilot: Inside ARTEX Cybercrime Campaigns

Summary

Check Point Research analyzed operator consoles of ARTEX, a Chinese open-source, AI-powered penetration testing platform that uses LLMs to coordinate agents. The research found more than 1,800 publicly exposed ARTEX instances, mostly used for opportunistic, financially motivated cybercrime, with Chinese models such as Deepseek Flash most prevalent. Operators interacted little with their agents, which abused web vulnerabilities such as Remote Code Execution (RCE) and in some cases carried out supply chain attacks.

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