ConnectWise Credential Abuse: Huntress Examines Whether an AI Agent Was Behind the Attack

Huntress has published a follow-up to its earlier report on the abuse of a ConnectWise Cloud Backup credential, which was used to access Microsoft 365 tenants. Microsoft has attributed the activity to a threat actor it tracks as Storm-0940, which it says used ARTEX, an open-source multi-agent AI framework, to sign in to downstream tenants at machine speed. Huntress says its own telemetry is consistent with this, but it cannot confirm the finding independently.

On October 15, Huntress saw three modes of operation: scripted enumeration, hands-on operator work, and tooling that kept running even after its target was gone. In the tenants examined, the tooling changed in under a minute between runs, and a retry loop appeared in the run after a failure. Some actions were tested in one tenant before being run in batches, a pattern seen three times across two tools. Huntress' working hypothesis is that scripted tooling did most of the work, while something adapted it quickly between runs, possibly an AI agent with occasional human intervention.

Huntress rates its confidence that a large language model was involved as low-to-medium on its own telemetry, and medium-to-high when Microsoft's attribution is included. It cautions that signs of AI use, such as cadence, retry loops and user agents, will fade as these tools improve. Its advice is for defenders to detect what the activity does, not how it paces itself.