Experts urge defence plans against agentic pen-test tools

Security practitioners should assume that criminals are already using agentic penetration-testing tools and should put a defensive plan in place immediately, according to a Dark Reading article published on 12 November 2026.

The article, headlined "Cyber Experts Weigh In: How to Fight Artex & AntiFox", names two such tools, Artex and AntiFox. Penetration-testing tools are software built to probe networks and applications for weaknesses in the way an attacker would; agentic versions are driven by AI systems that can plan and carry out sequences of steps with limited human direction. Dark Reading describes the criminal adoption of these tools as "a proverbial genie out of the bottle at this point", meaning the publication treats the shift as already done rather than as a forecast.

The practical advice in the piece is addressed to enterprises rather than to individual users. Dark Reading says organisations "need to get a defense plan in place right away". The publication does not, in the material available here, set out a timeline for when Artex and AntiFox first appeared, name the vendors or groups behind them, or identify specific victims.

That gap matters for readers trying to act on the advice. Dual-use is a long-standing feature of penetration-testing software: the same capability that lets a security team find its own weaknesses lets an intruder find someone else's. What is new, on Dark Reading's account, is that the tooling is agentic, which changes the amount of human effort an attacker needs to supply. The article frames the problem as one of defensive readiness rather than of stopping the tools from circulating.

The Agentic Times has not independently verified the existence, capabilities or distribution of Artex or AntiFox, and the single source available does not describe confirmed incidents involving either tool. Readers should treat the names as reported by Dark Reading rather than as established and widely documented threats. Likewise, the experts quoted in the original article are not identified in the material available to us, so the specific recommendations they make — which controls to prioritise, how to tune detection, what to log — cannot be summarised here without risking invention.

For security teams, the useful takeaway from the piece is narrow but clear. Dark Reading's position is that the question of whether criminals will use agentic penetration-testing tools has been settled, and that planning should proceed on that assumption. Teams that want the detailed guidance will need to read the original article, which carries the experts' own views.