Threat researchers have uncovered a global China-linked hacking campaign that used the ARTEX agentic framework and DeepSeek AI to target more than 200 organizations. At least nine were successfully compromised.
The operation ran over 11 days from Oct. 17 and targeted organizations in at least 14 countries, according to CrowdStrike threat researchers.
These included foreign ministries in Latin America, Europe, Asia and the Middle East, one European country’s presidency and prime minister’s office and 19 US organizations in the pharmaceutical, semiconductor, defense, nuclear and financial sectors.
The group, which CrowdStrike tracks as VAPOR PANDA, also ran password-spraying attacks against at least 12 more organizations, including US think tanks.
This campaign is separate from the ARTEX campaign Microsoft disclosed last week under the name Storm-0940. CrowdStrike said this likely shows the framework is “quickly gaining popularity among multiple China-nexus adversaries.”
China-linked hackers escalate AI use
The campaign is VAPOR PANDA’s first observed use of AI-driven tooling, and a notable broadening of its targets beyond its usual government, think tank and energy victims.
“This campaign marks an escalation in China-nexus use of AI agents, from single intrusions to multiple simultaneous engagements directed by a human operator,” Adam Meyers, senior vice president of intelligence at CrowdStrike, said. “The operation also shows the adversary building endpoint sensor evasion directly into their agentic workflow.”
VAPOR PANDA ran ARTEX mainly on DeepSeek, alongside a second commercial AI model that CrowdStrike could not identify. A human operator steered the AI agents in Chinese at key decision points, including telling them to find Windows machines without CrowdStrike’s security software installed.
CrowdStrike expects more AI-powered attacks to follow. “China-nexus adversaries will highly likely continue adopting agentic frameworks such as ARTEX over the next 12 months, pairing them with commercially available LLMs, and enabling small teams to quickly scale intrusions across many targets simultaneously,” it said.
CrowdStrike advised organizations to rotate keys exposed in old backups and exports, enforce SAML signature validation, patch internet-facing appliances and close gaps in endpoint monitoring.
