South Korean investigators say hackers used a Chinese-made AI agent called Artex to breach at least seven financial firms, stealing personal data belonging to 68,000 people. The Wall Street Journal reports that Seoul officials first detected the attacks last week. The stolen personal information included some customers’ annual income and personal-loan limits. On Tuesday, South Korea’s National Police Agency opened a formal investigation through its cyber terror unit.
Investigators traced the intrusions to more than two dozen internet addresses spread across roughly a dozen countries, including the United States, Japan and Germany. No culprits have been identified so far, and officials said they are seeking international cooperation to track down those responsible. At a cabinet meeting Tuesday, President Lee Jae Myung pressed banks to shore up their defenses. “Speed is of the essence,” he said, adding, “Implement the necessary measures immediately.” The tool at the center of the investigation, Artex, is an open-source AI agent built by Li Puhua, a Chinese cybersecurity engineer who goes by the alias Autumn. Artex isn’t an AI model itself. It draws on existing models, including Anthropic’s Claude Opus, OpenAI’s ChatGPT and China’s DeepSeek, to provide cybersecurity services. Li designed it to help organizations find network vulnerabilities, not to enable attacks. South Korean officials have not said which underlying AI models were used in the bank breaches.
