Microsoft Threat Intelligence published research on November 5 describing threat actors who have used ARTEX, an open-source agentic offensive framework, since August 2026 to search public GitHub repositories at volume. The queries pair a target organization's name with keywords for exposed credentials, application secrets, cloud services and AI inference keys.

In at least one case, Microsoft says, an agent went from scanning GitHub for a client secret to exfiltrating data from Azure Key Vault in five minutes. Follow-on activity from October 28 used valid application credentials for successful service-principal sign-ins across dozens of applications in multiple tenants, then read Key Vault and Storage accounts, enumerated App Service, Kubernetes and SQL resources, searched Azure DevOps for more secrets, and corrected its own failed API calls within roughly 28 to 80 seconds — machine tempo, not human. Censys separately counted 1,465 exposed ARTEX consoles as of November 4, while noting that authorized testers also run the framework.

Microsoft attributes the activity to no named group and says it overlaps a campaign security firm Todyl tracks as Key Eater, run from the same infrastructure. Its advice is blunt: treat any publicly exposed secret as compromised even after the commit is deleted, rotate the keys, and move applications off secret-based authentication toward managed identities.