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Storm-0940 used agentic AI in the ConnectWise attack

Microsoft says a China-state aligned group automated its attacks with ARTEX, an open-source agentic pentest framework, in some cases going from target to privileged access in under 3 hours.

By: Mikola Máté Patrik · · 2 min read

Microsoft Threat Intelligence hexagon icon on a dark blue card over a green gradient
Image: Microsoft · Press kit · Official Microsoft Security Blog featured image (og:image) · Source

What happened?

Microsoft Threat Intelligence published its analysis on October 21 (Microsoft). It says Storm-0940, a China-state aligned actor, has used the ARTEX agentic AI penetration-testing framework since at least September 2026 to automate attacks on hundreds of organizations, from defense to finance to government.

What is ARTEX?

An open-source pentest framework that can work with any AI model: a multi-agent LLM system written in Go with a Next.js frontend. Its agents run an attack from reconnaissance to data exfiltration with little human interaction and collect discovered assets and vulnerabilities into a graph.

The ConnectWise thread

  • Between October 10 and 14, a password-spray campaign hit 327 accounts with more than 151,000 failed logons, peaking at 2,900 failures per minute.
  • ConnectWise issued an advisory on October 16 about unauthorized access affecting its Cloud Backup service.
  • Using stolen ConnectWise application credentials, ARTEX attempted sign-ins to more than 2,250 Microsoft 365 tenants without any interactive user sign-in.
  • In some environments the agents used Microsoft Graph for reconnaissance, added application credentials and changed permissions, which can persist as a backdoor even after the compromised app is remediated.

CyberScoop also reported the attribution to Storm-0940 (CyberScoop).

What to do now

If the affected ConnectWise application was ever installed in your organization, Microsoft's key recommendations are:

  • Keep affected ConnectWise connections disabled until ConnectWise provides formal restoration instructions.
  • Do not delete enterprise applications as a first response; preserve configuration and evidence first.
  • Review service-principal sign-ins and Graph activity from at least October 15, ideally from October 1, searching by application ID.
  • Check Entra audit logs for new app credentials, owners, consent grants and role assignments.

Why it matters

This is one of the first well-documented cases of a state actor using agentic AI to push a supply chain attack to machine speed. Agents do not tire, work nights and weekends and try several paths in parallel. For defenders, response time becomes the bottleneck rather than the number of alerts.

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