Microsoft says "pro-China" hackers used AI to attack, hundreds of organizations worldwide targeted

Microsoft said on Wednesday (the 21st) that a hacker group "aligned with the Chinese government's position" used an AI-driven penetration testing tool to breach information services company ConnectWise, and hundreds of organizations worldwide were targeted in this wave of attacks. According to Reuters, ConnectWise CEO Rivilo said that based on Microsoft's analysis and the evidence the company has, this attack against ConnectWise Cloud Backup "appears to have been carried out by an organization aligned with the Chinese government's position." Microsoft tracks the hacker group under the code name Storm-0940, which used an open-source penetration testing framework called ARTEX to launch this wave of cyberattacks; ARTEX allows users to use any AI model to automatically perform penetration testing work, and can also be configured to autonomously carry out multiple tasks such as reconnaissance and data theft. ConnectWise has disabled the affected application connections and is restoring services in stages, but Rivilo said these measures cannot eliminate the access permissions to customers' cloud systems that attackers may have already obtained, and each must still be checked one by one.