Microsoft Says China-Linked Hackers Used AI Agents to Breach ConnectWise in Global Attack

Microsoft said on October 21 that a China state-aligned hacking group it tracks as Storm-0940 was behind a supply-chain attack on ConnectWise, an IT management software vendor whose tools are widely used by managed service providers and corporate IT departments.

According to Microsoft, the attackers compromised application identities tied to ConnectWise's Cloud Backup product, formerly known as SkyKick, and used that access to reach into customer Microsoft 365 environments. To carry out the intrusion at scale, Microsoft said the group relied on ARTEX, an open-source AI agent framework built to automate offensive security tasks such as reconnaissance, password spraying, and abuse of OAuth application permissions.

Microsoft said the activity attempted sign-ins against more than 2,250 Microsoft 365 tenants, with bursts of up to roughly 2,900 sign-in attempts per minute at its peak. Most of those attempts failed, but the company said the group obtained privileged cloud access at a number of organizations, in some cases within about three hours of first contact.

Microsoft's findings describe a broader campaign dating back to at least September that touched hundreds of organizations across manufacturing, aerospace, chemicals, energy, defense, and financial services. The company did not disclose how many of the targeted organizations ultimately had data taken.

ConnectWise confirmed unauthorized access to its systems and said it suspended several services, including Cloud Backup, SaaS Security, and Cloud Management, as a precaution while it investigated. The company did not publicly address Microsoft's attribution of the attack to Storm-0940.

Security researchers covering the incident said it fits a pattern of attackers using off-the-shelf AI agent tools to speed up and scale established hacking techniques, like credential stuffing and lateral movement across cloud accounts, rather than inventing fundamentally new attack methods.