The infrastructure hosting AntiFox was used for various malicious activities, including vulnerability exploitation, webshell deployment, credential validation, configuration discovery, and AWS secret harvesting. Initially created as a fork of ARTEX 0.1.1, AntiFox has a Chinese-language interface and lets users deploy AI agents and automate common penetration-testing tasks, such as mapping exposed services and probing target endpoints for vulnerabilities. Security researchers at Arctic Wolf observed malicious AntiFox-linked infrastructure hosted on Alibaba Cloud using valid AWS identities, including IAM users and, in some cases, assumed EC2 roles, to make authenticated requests to Amazon Web Services APIs.
"In several recently observed intrusions, Alibaba Cloud systems hosting AntiFox interfaces were associated with confirmed malicious actions against internet-facing web services and associated AWS environments," Arctic Wolf says. One case highlighted in the report involved deploying an ASPX webshell on an internet-exposed IIS server, executing OS commands, accessing application settings and database connection strings, and copying configuration and log files to a web-accessible directory.
