A backdoored copy of the AI penetration-testing tool ARTEX is handing out unauthenticated root shells to anyone who can reach its login page, after a copycat Docker image was downloaded thousands of times. The finding comes from independent researcher Badbyte.

ARTEX is a Chinese-language, open-source AI penetration testing console. Its author posted a notice on 8 October saying the tool had been abused, that it would go closed source and that no further versions would be released, and the repository came down. That evening, a new Docker Hub account named tomicdd was created and pushed an ARTEX image, while a GitHub account named trhhubsd uploaded a copy of the source with one line changed to point at that image. The image contains one extra function: it runs whatever command arrives in the login form, before the password is checked, and sends the output back.

7,946 pulls, 62 exposed consoles

Badbyte counted 7,946 pulls of the backdoored image by 3 November — 7,913 of tomicdd/artex and 33 of congdonglinux/artex — against Docker Hub's figure of 9,000 downloads. As many as 62 internet-facing consoles were found serving the backdoored build between 2 and 4 November, with 46 still serving it at 09:55 UTC on 4 November, out of 1,645 ARTEX consoles found live on the internet. A further 637 GitHub repositories still point their compose file at the image.

The danger is structural: following the copycat README runs docker compose up, Docker pulls tomicdd/artex, the compose file publishes port 8787 on all interfaces, and the container runs as root, with the database password and any LLM API keys in its environment. Anyone who ran an ARTEX image they cannot trace to the original authors should take it offline and rotate whatever it touched. This is distinct from the separate WorkOS/ARTEX breach.

Sources: Badbyte, ARTEX Backdoor: 7,946 Pulls of a Trojanized Docker Image Handing Out Root Shells, 5 November 2026; The Hacker News, CERT-In Flags AI-Driven Attacks as Backdoored ARTEX Exposes 62 Consoles to Root Access, 5 November 2026.