Cloudflare sees AI pentest tools surge 30x since ARTEX was taken down

Nov 13, 2026
Over 50 families of autonomous attack frameworks scanned Cloudflare customers in three days; forks of ARTEX now make up 60% of them.

Cloudflare says AI-driven penetration testing and attack frameworks have exploded since ARTEX, an open-source agentic pentesting tool, was taken down by its creator on 8 October, the company wrote. In the last three days it saw more than 50 framework families try to scan its customers, from thousands of IP addresses.

There are now more than 12,000 repositories with code from the original, and ARTEX forks make up over 60% of known AI pentest orchestrators. Daily requests from these tools have grown more than 30 times since 1 October, and some now chain stolen credentials to move through networks. Cloudflare's incident team has handled several cases involving ARTEX-derived tools, and it urges organisations to adopt what it calls a Modern Security Model.

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