Seven Domestic Financial Institutions Hacked Using AI Tool ARTEX

From late September to early October, the AI-based attack tool ARTEX, used in hacking domestic financial institutions, was found to have focused on searching for the names and financial information of virtual asset companies. ARTEX also appeared to have searched for sensitive information such as passwords and internal databases. According to a report by the American security company Datadog, ARTEX accessed the cloud environments of several companies in October, repeatedly searching for the names of digital asset companies, hedge funds, and financial institutions. ARTEX is an AI-based automated penetration testing tool developed in China, where attackers set targets and multiple AI agents explore vulnerabilities and execute attacks. ARTEX was also utilized in hacking incidents targeting seven domestic financial institutions from late September to early October. On October 7, CrowdStrike reported that it had confirmed indications of breaches and information leaks involving domestic financial institutions using ARTEX and large language models (LLMs). According to Datadog's analysis, ARTEX searched for information by combining financial-related words such as fund, invoice, and payment with the names of digital asset companies. On October 20, it expanded its search scope to include document files such as PDFs and Excel, as well as internal IPs, databases, passwords, and cloud access keys. However, it has not been confirmed whether any information or passwords from digital asset companies were successfully stolen.

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