Internet scanning firm Censys has found 1,465 hosts running publicly exposed consoles for ARTEX, an open-source AI agent framework for autonomous penetration testing that has been tied to attacks on South Korean banks and the ConnectWise Cloud Backup supply-chain compromise. Censys published the count, current as of November 4, in a research post on November 5.
About 650 of those hosts sit in two blocks of identically configured servers, leaving roughly 815 deployments that look distinct. Censys said the uniform setups point to a provisioning template rather than hundreds of individual operators. Because the ARTEX console does not need to face the public internet at all, the firm said the true number of deployments is likely higher.
The United States hosted the most exposed consoles at 726, followed by Hong Kong with 387, China with 177, Japan with 51, Singapore with 38 and South Korea with 21. PEG Tech's network accounted for 493 hosts across 13 address blocks, and Yancy Limited for 157. Censys said 155 ARTEX hosts, or 10.6%, also ran at least one other tool it tracks as a threat, including Cobalt Strike, Vshell and Adaptix C2.
Key facts
- 01Censys counted 1,465 hosts running exposed ARTEX consoles as of November 4, 2026.
- 02About 650 hosts sit in two identical hosting blocks, leaving roughly 815 distinct-looking deployments.
- 03The US hosted 726 exposed consoles, Hong Kong 387 and China 177.
- 04155 ARTEX hosts, or 10.6%, also ran other threat tools such as Cobalt Strike and Vshell.
- 05Microsoft tied ARTEX to Storm-0940's ConnectWise compromise, with sign-in attempts against more than 2,250 tenants.
ARTEX was published on GitHub by a user named Autumn-27 on July 26, 2026, under the AGPL-3.0 license. It is written in Go with a Next.js console, splits work between planner and worker agents, and can run on models from Anthropic, OpenAI or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint. Autumn-27 also wrote ScopeSentry, an asset-discovery platform with more than 2,000 GitHub stars, and ARTEX collected an estimated 1,500 to 2,000 stars within ten weeks.
Some deployments exposed their operators' toolkits along with the console. Censys counted 32 open directories on ARTEX hosts while writing the post, holding exploit binaries, a Windows lateral-movement kit, implant builds, the private key for a man-in-the-middle root certificate authority and one operator's home directory, including SSH files and shell history. Between November 3 and November 5, 10 of those directories closed and 15 new ones appeared.
ARTEX first drew wide attention in an October 7 CrowdStrike report on an actor who targeted a South Korean finance company from late September into early October, breaching a broker-facing loan inquiry service at one bank and an employee mobile system at another. That ARTEX instance ran DeepSeek v4.1-flash as its main model. Censys said the server CrowdStrike identified had exposed open directories since August 18, seven weeks before the report, with attack data reaching beyond South Korean banks to payment and gaming companies.
On October 21, Microsoft attributed the ConnectWise Cloud Backup compromise to Storm-0940, which it describes as a China state-aligned actor active since 2021. Microsoft said the group used ARTEX for scanning, password spraying and OAuth abuse, attempting sign-ins to more than 2,250 tenants at a peak of 2,900 attempts per minute, and some victims saw privileged cloud access taken in under three hours.
Many of the attacks linked to ARTEX relied on weak or known passwords and on accounts that lacked multi-factor authentication.
Censys said not every ARTEX instance is run with malicious intent, and many are likely used by authorized testers. The day after CrowdStrike's report, Autumn-27 posted a statement denying involvement in the attacks, saying ARTEX was meant for testing within authorized scopes and that the project would go closed-source with no further releases. The repository has since been taken down, but archived copies, translations and rebrands such as ScopeWeaver still circulate.
Censys published a detection query keyed to the console's page title and static assets, and added ARTEX and ScopeWeaver threat labels to its platform so defenders can hunt for deployments. The console listens on port 8787 by default.
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