A 26-year-old China-based hacker likely used an artificial intelligence agent and Anthropic’s Claude Code to target at least nine South Korean banks, U.S. cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike said, in a campaign that highlights the growing ability of individuals to use AI to conduct attacks at scale.
CrowdStrike said in a report published on Wednesday that it assessed with moderate confidence that the suspected attacker was a Chinese speaker and financially motivated. The company said it uncovered personal information potentially linked to the attacker while analysing sessions involving AI coding tools and infrastructure associated with the campaign.
At least nine South Korean banks have disclosed or been reported by local media as targets of cyberattacks since late September, prompting South Korean police to launch a probe this week. President Lee Jae Myung has called for robust measures in response to the attacks.
Adam Meyers, senior vice president of counter adversary operations at CrowdStrike, told reporters on a call on Thursday that the campaign demonstrated how a human attacker could use AI agents to conduct attacks against multiple targets.
“And this is significant because it allows one human to target many customers in a very short period of time using the power of AI,” he said.
The attacks are likely to add to growing concerns among governments and companies about the security risks posed by AI agents, which can perform tasks with limited human intervention, and whether existing cybersecurity systems are equipped to defend against them.
Shinhan Bank said last week that personal information belonging to about 25,000 customers had been compromised, while KB Kookmin Bank said personal information of 119 customers had been leaked.
Australia said last month that an OpenAI autonomous agent breached a government health statistics portal in June, in one of the first known cases involving an AI agent hacking a government system.
The rise of autonomous AI systems is also creating new questions for cyber insurers, including whether such systems fit traditional definitions of a cyber attacker and who should bear liability when AI-generated actions result in losses.
CrowdStrike said the suspected attacker used ARTEX, a recently released Chinese-developed open-source penetration-testing tool, together with large language models including Anthropic’s Claude.
“While this activity has not been attributed to a named adversary, the threat actor is likely a Chinese speaker and financially motivated,” the CrowdStrike report said.
“This assessment is made with moderate confidence based on the use of the Chinese-developed tool ARTEX and observed Chinese-language prompts.”
The cybersecurity company said the attacker asked Claude where threat actors typically sell information stolen in Korean data breaches and sought assistance locating Korean Telegram groups used to sell stolen data.
In another Claude session, the individual asked the AI to create a resume for a security researcher. The resume contained details including a Telegram account, age, educational background and a location in Maoming, a city in Guangdong province in southern China.
CrowdStrike said the information likely belonged to the suspected attacker.
A man who answered a phone number published by CrowdStrike in its report said he had no knowledge of the matter.
Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said at a regular press briefing that the ministry was not familiar with the case and that China, as a matter of principle, has consistently opposed and combated hacking activities.
ARTEX is an open-source AI agent designed to automate penetration testing. It was published on GitHub this year by a Chinese security engineer using the handle Autumn.
The tool is not itself a large language model. Instead, it connects to external AI models such as ChatGPT, Claude and DeepSeek to help organisations identify vulnerabilities in their networks.
Its GitHub page says ARTEX is intended for personal learning, code research and local technical verification and should not be used to conduct real-world testing against online systems or websites.
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