The Machine Week: The Week Attackers Almost Went Full Autopilot

Between October 13 and 22, five incidents highlighted the use of automation and AI agents in cyberattacks. Specifically, Storm-0940, a China-state-aligned group, utilized the ARTEX Go-based agentic AI penetration-testing framework to compromise ConnectWise Cloud Backup application credentials. This enabled the actor to execute automated password spraying at a rate of 2,900 sign-in attempts per minute across 2,250 Microsoft 365 tenants, successfully achieving privileged access in less than three hours during the operation.