Attackers are abusing AntiFox, an open-source AI penetration-testing platform, to break into web servers and steal Amazon Web Services (AWS) secrets, Arctic Wolf Labs reports. In several intrusions, Alibaba Cloud systems hosting AntiFox interfaces were tied to attacks on internet-facing web services and the AWS environments behind them.

Web shells first, cloud secrets next

In some cases the entry point was a compromised internet-facing Microsoft IIS application; Arctic Wolf could not identify the vulnerability used. The IIS worker process, w3wp.exe, created an ASPX web shell, ran commands to gather system information and read the web.config file for database connection details. They then tried to reach an internal production database with a credential taken from the configuration file.

In other attacks the intruders started with a valid AWS credential from an unknown source. They used valid IAM identities and, in some cases, an assumed EC2 role to enumerate dozens of services, including IAM, EC2, S3, Lambda, Secrets Manager, KMS, RDS, ECS, EKS, Redshift, Athena, Glue, API Gateway, CloudWatch, DynamoDB and Bedrock.

Hundreds of API calls in half an hour

In one intrusion, the attackers cycled through several AWS identities and sent hundreds of API requests in 30 minutes. Most came back as AccessDenied, but some succeeded, including a GetSecretValue request against a production secret. S3 copy and delete operations were also seen. AWS said its services were not compromised and operated as designed: the attackers used credentials taken from customers' compromised applications.

AntiFox is a Chinese-language, AGPL-licensed fork of the ARTEX framework, created on GitHub in October. Censys data counted 1,465 exposed ARTEX consoles as of 4 November 2026. Arctic Wolf urged defenders to rotate exposed credentials, enforce least privilege and watch for rapid cross-service enumeration. The Hacker News reported the campaign, and Security Affairs covered the same Arctic Wolf research.