Hundreds of copies of Chinese-made ARTEX hacking tools leaked online for anyone to use in further attacks

Security researchers at Censys identified 1,465 hosts running exposed consoles for ARTEX, a Chinese-made AI penetration-testing tool that has been adopted in real-world attacks since its release in late July 2026. About 10 percent of those hosts, 155, were also running at least one other tool commonly used in cyberattacks, such as Cobalt Strike, Vshell or Adaptix C2, and 32 publicly accessible directories exposed exploit binaries, post-exploitation tools and other sensitive files. Censys said not all of the exposed instances are malicious, and overall global deployment is likely higher.