One hacker's AI agents break into websites of 100-plus companies at about $50 a hack
Reuters reported on Oct 19 that a single Chinese-speaking hacker used autonomous AI agents, run through exposed copies of the open-source Cairn platform, to break into websites belonging to more than 100 companies after trying more than 1,200 sites, beginning on Sept 25 against US, Canadian, Australian and Japanese e-commerce sites. Reuters established the victims' identities by independently reviewing the hacker's Cairn activity. Deere said it had taken 'necessary remediation actions' and had 'no indication that sensitive information was accessed'; SharkNinja said the hack hit a standalone product-support site and had been contained; Cummins said it was investigating a report of a potential attack on a website operated by a third-party vendor. NorForge's Snorre Fagerland, who found the exposed panels from about Oct 2, estimated successful intrusions typically took around 23 hours of probing and cost roughly $5,000 in tokens in all, about $50 per successful hack; the hacker's instructions ran to fewer than 100 Chinese characters. The campaign appeared to use a mixture of DeepSeek and Anthropic's Claude Code (a worker labeled 'claudecode_deepseek-v4.1-flash'); neither Reuters nor NorForge confirmed the models. Reuters could not ascertain how much data, if any, was extracted.
Damage
Web shells on sites of 100-plus companies in four countries; data extraction not established
In their words
“It's a new world now.”
Sources
Reuters (via Honolulu Star-Advertiser), second source. Dated from the campaign's start (Sept 25, per Reuters); disclosed Oct 19 (Reuters, Raphael Satter, 17:58 UTC). Reuters.com itself could not be opened by this run; the wire text was read on the Star-Advertiser. The Hacker News (Oct 20) adds NorForge's figures: more than 20 of the exposed Cairn panels judged malicious, cluster AIA0001 linked 14 panels to more than 1,100 attack projects, success rate around 10%, about $5 per task including failures, and a tool author ('le1xia0') who said the platform 'was not designed for hacking attacks'. Added Oct 24, five days after disclosure; missed by earlier runs. Compare korea-banks-artex (ARTEX) and crowdstrike-four-agentic-crews: the same pattern, open-source agent harnesses on commercial models, now at consumer-website scale.
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