On October 11, a Chinese hacking operation fired off 111,000 password-spray attacks against American companies in a single day. Not with an army of keyboard warriors. With an AI agent that never sleeps, never takes a lunch break, and was clocking 2,900 sign-in attempts per minute.
The target was ConnectWise, a Tampa-based IT company whose software manages the digital backbone for thousands of small and mid-size businesses across the country. One breach there, and you're inside all of them.
Microsoft disclosed the attack on October 21, attributing it to Storm-0940, a China state-aligned hacking group that's been active since at least 2021. According to Microsoft's security blog, the group weaponized a Go-based AI penetration framework called ARTEX — originally built as a legitimate security testing tool — and turned it loose on ConnectWise's cloud infrastructure in a campaign that began in September 2026.
The numbers are staggering. Between October 10 and 14, Storm-0940's infrastructure at IP address 144.172.64.99 conducted an automated cross-tenant password-spray campaign targeting 327 accounts across eight organizations. Microsoft reported that 151,000 failed logon events were captured during that window alone, with 48 accounts receiving more than 1,000 failures each. By October 15, the AI agents had gained access to ConnectWise's application identities.
"Storm-0940's use of ARTEX accelerated the speed of compromised application abuse to authenticate to target environments through applications that had already been granted access, allowing the threat actor to operate without requiring an interactive user sign-in," Microsoft stated.
Translation: the AI didn't need to trick a human into clicking a bad link. It exploited the trust already baked into ConnectWise's own software connections.
ConnectWise discovered the breach on October 14 and by October 17 had disabled seven application identities and suspended three services — Cloud Backup, SaaS Security, and Cloud Management. That left customers unable to run scheduled backups, restore stored data, or use key security tools. By October 19, the company completed credential resets. Restoration of Microsoft 365 backup functions didn't begin until October 28.
Two weeks without backups. For businesses whose entire operation lives in the cloud, that's not an inconvenience. That's an existential threat.
Zscaler ThreatLabz researcher Seongsu Park found that ARTEX was configured to use DeepSeek — a Chinese AI model — through an OpenAI-compatible gateway, with other configurations specifying GLM and Grok. The framework wasn't some dark-web novelty. It was a legitimate penetration testing tool that Chinese operators repurposed into a weapon.
Microsoft drove the point home: "Agents are not constrained by factors affecting humans — they can work around the clock, on weekends, and on holidays and attempt multiple breach paths simultaneously, enabling significantly reduced time from selecting a target to achieving objectives."
Researchers at Wiz, the Google-owned cybersecurity firm, confirmed the scale. "The activity was persistent and highly automated. Some sessions lasted 24 to 30 hours, and when IPs were blocked, new addresses appeared within minutes," Wiz researchers Sapir Federovsky and Rami McCarthy reported. Microsoft's own research showed the framework could achieve privileged access in under three hours.
ConnectWise acknowledged the scope in its October 21 advisory, tracing the attack to a suspected Chinese state-aligned group. "The activity describes a campaign that reaches well beyond any one company," the company stated. "Nation-state actors are increasingly targeting the software supply chain, because one trusted connection can open the door to many organizations."
This wasn't ConnectWise's first brush with nation-state hackers either. In May 2025, the company disclosed a separate suspected intrusion involving its ScreenConnect product, investigated by cybersecurity firm Mandiant.
The sectors Storm-0940 targeted read like a strategic wish list: aerospace and defense, automotive, energy, financial services, government, military, semiconductor, and software companies. This isn't random cybercrime. This is intelligence collection with an AI accelerator strapped to it.
ConnectWise put it plainly: "AI now lets them test those connections at machine speed. MSPs are in the middle of that chain. They are targets in their own right, and they are also a path into every client they serve."
Wiz researchers offered the uncomfortable bottom line: "As AI makes reconnaissance and exploitation attempts faster and easier to scale, defenders need to shorten the gap between exposure and remediation."
2,250 businesses. 2,900 attempts per minute. One AI agent that doesn't need sleep. The gap between exposure and remediation is measured in seconds now, and our adversaries are the ones with the stopwatch.
