Espionage group VAPOR PANDA hacked ministries with AI agents, CrowdStrike says

CrowdStrike says VAPOR PANDA, a China-nexus espionage group, used ARTEX, a framework of AI agents, to run intrusions against more than 200 organizations from Oct 17. Targets included foreign ministries in Latin America, Europe, Asia and the Middle East, US pharmaceutical, semiconductor and defense firms, think tanks and telecom providers. CrowdStrike confirmed post-exploitation activity at nine organizations, where the group deployed the BLOODALCHEMY backdoor, and saw password spraying against at least 12 more.

In CrowdStrike’s account, ARTEX runs a main agent that directs planner and worker agents through a shared record of facts, findings and goals. It takes each intrusion from initial access to lateral movement. VAPOR PANDA ran it mainly on the DeepSeek model, plus a second commercial model CrowdStrike couldn’t identify. Recovered transcripts show an operator giving instructions in Chinese and steering several intrusions at once, including telling the agents to find Windows machines without CrowdStrike’s Falcon sensor.

At one US pharmaceutical firm, the agent chained an unsigned SAML assertion with an Extensible Markup Language (XML) external entity flaw to query the cloud metadata service. That gave it a role that could issue administration commands to thousands of instances. At another, it abused an unauthenticated orchestration service to get root in a container environment and read Local Administrator Password Solution (LAPS) passwords. Against a Greek government entity, the operator gave the agent a 2022 directory export from the mail server with authentication keys, which the agent used to forge an administrator token.

At an interior ministry in the Middle East and a foreign ministry in Latin America, the group deployed BLOODALCHEMY, a backdoor first documented in October 2023. A legitimate GameHook binary renamed svchost.exe loaded a malicious library, graphics-hook-filter64.dll, which decrypted the backdoor from graphics-hook_config.bin. CrowdStrike says this campaign is separate from the ARTEX activity reported under the name Storm-0940.

CrowdStrike hasn’t named the organizations hit. It says the campaign widens VAPOR PANDA’s targeting, which since 2021 had mostly covered government, think tank, energy and extractive organizations in Europe, North America, Oceania and the UK.