‘Artex’ appeared in financial sector hacking… Paid release notice in China

(Seoul = Yonhap News) Reporter Kwon Ha-young = Artex, an artificial intelligence (AI) penetration testing tool whose development was halted after it was discovered that it was being abused in serial hacking in the domestic financial sector, is expected to re-emerge as a paid service through a Chinese security company.

Threatbook plans to introduce 'RedAgents.ai', a cloud-based platform that integrates several AI penetration testing agents, including the commercial version of Artex.

According to the industry on the 16th, Threatbook co-founder and CEO Xue Feng announced the launch of Red Agent.ai in a post posted on his social networking service (SNS), saying, "Artex is back with a commercial version."

Artex is a Chinese-based AI autonomous penetration testing system that was discovered to have been abused in serial hacking targeting domestic financial institutions from late September to early October.

At the time, Artex was released as open source on the developer platform GitHub, but when the possibility of abuse was raised, the developer switched the repository to private and declared to stop updates.

It was confirmed that the person who developed Artex was originally a threat detection engineer at Threatbook, and Artex was a personally developed project.

CEO Xue Feng said that the company is developing a new AI penetration testing platform, including 'ARTEX PRO', the commercial version of Artex, and that the engineer is currently leading this project.

According to CEO Xue Feng, RedAgent.ai runs in a cloud environment that supports ZDR (Zero Data Retention) function, which does not retain data.

In addition to Artex Pro, the platform includes 'YanXun' developed by a company affiliated with Peking University, 'YanJi', which took first place in the individual category of the Tencent AI penetration testing competition, and a commercial version of 'Cyberstrike AI' recently acquired by Threatbook.

Threatbook plans to add agents participating in the platform in the future.

CEO Xue Feng explained, “A single agent cannot find all vulnerabilities,” and “Like human penetration testing, AI agents each have different strengths and approaches, so using multiple agents together allows for a broader security inspection.”

Threatbook announced that it plans to release a preview version of RedAgent.ai soon and is accepting waiting list applications for users who want to use it early.

Meanwhile, financial authorities previously announced that about 100,000 pieces of information were leaked from 16 financial institutions, including Shinhan Bank, KB Kookmin Bank, Hana Bank, and Busan Bank.

At the time, traces of Artex were found in the IP used in the attack, and the National Police Agency's Cyber ​​Investigation Bureau is currently conducting a related investigation.