Amazon Threat Intelligence observes threat actor campaigns with ARTEX AI agents

Amazon Threat Intelligence reports that between Oct. 3 and Nov. 5, 2026, its MadPot decoy sensors captured requests from ARTEX agentic AI penetration-testing agents that carried their own campaign records, including a large-scale AI credential theft operation in which stolen keys paid for the LLM inference used to hunt more keys, and a campaign against two cryptocurrency exchanges using real-time deepfake injection to bypass KYC checks. Amazon assesses with moderate confidence that ARTEX was used and that the activity comes from disparate Chinese-nexus threat groups, based on simplified Chinese prompts, China time-zone configurations, targeting and tooling. The post shares IOCs and argues that while the techniques were not new, agents change attacker speed and persistence, making basic hygiene such as removing default credentials and exposed secrets the most effective defense.