Threat Actors Use Agentic AI Tooling to Find and Abuse Exposed Secrets
Microsoft, Thursday, November 5th, 2026
Microsoft observed attackers using the agentic framework ARTEX to find exposed secrets on GitHub and abuse compromised OAuth apps.
Microsoft Threat Intelligence observed threat actors using the ARTEX agentic AI framework to search public GitHub repositories for exposed credentials, OAuth application secrets and AI API keys.
The agents also analyze results and conduct follow-on attacks, in one case moving from scanning GitHub to exfiltrating data from Azure Key Vault in five minutes.
Since October 28, 2026, Microsoft saw successful service principal sign-ins from 199.19.77[.]84 using multiple application IDs, including a compromised multitenant vendor application used to reach downstream tenants.
The attackers performed cloud resource discovery, credential and data exfiltration from Key Vaults and Storage Accounts, and abuse of Azure AI services.