Security researchers have discovered hundreds of copies of a Chinese-made AI hacking tool publicly exposed to the internet for anyone to access, potentially allowing outsiders to launch cyberattacks against unsuspecting targets.
The hacking software, called Artex, is an open source autonomous penetration testing tool, meaning software that automatically probes computer systems for weaknesses, and it’s been linked to several cyberattacks since its public release in July. As open source software, it’s free for anyone to download and run on their own servers, making it a popular tool for those who cannot access Anthropic or OpenAI’s most advanced cybersecurity AI models for discovering security vulnerabilities. Microsoft has previously described Artex as a system of AI agents that can conduct cyberattacks “from reconnaissance through data exfiltration with little needed human interaction.”
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Source: TechCrunch
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