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Chinese state hackers used the ARTEX AI framework to run intrusions against more than 200 organizations
Ourtake
Agentic tools let a small team pursue a far wider target set than manual operations would allow, according to CrowdStrike.
What happened
Chinese state-sponsored hackers tracked by CrowdStrike as Vapor Panda used ARTEX, an AI penetration testing framework, with DeepSeek and an unnamed commercial LLM against more than 200 organizations starting October 17, 2026. Post-exploitation was confirmed at nine organizations, with a human operator directing the agents.