One hacker used AI agents to break into more than 100 companies

What happened

Snorre Fagerland, principal threat researcher at NorForge, set out the findings on Monday in a report on Cairn, the open-source AI platform the hacker used.^[1] The campaign started on 25 September, and Fagerland began finding exposed Cairn control panels around 2 October.^[1] The hacker gave the agents fewer than 100 Chinese characters of instructions, then the agents spent hours probing targets with little human direction.^[2] By late last week, the agents had tried to breach more than 1,200 websites across the United States, Canada, Australia and Japan.^[2] Successful attacks took a little under 23 hours on average.^[1]

Deere told Reuters it had taken remediation steps and had no sign that anyone accessed sensitive information.^[1] SharkNinja said the attack hit a standalone product support site and that it had contained the threat.^[1] Cummins said it was looking into a report of a possible attack on a website run by one of its vendors.^[1]

What the video doesn't say

NorForge says the aim seemed to be lasting access to shop and payment systems, for later use.^[1] Across the tools it saw, NorForge estimated an average success rate of about 10%.^[1] The open panels also leaked secrets from the targets, and Trufflehog verified 11% of the exposed secrets as valid.^[1] In September, Gambit Security documented an AI agent-driven spree involving breaches at 25 companies and the theft of at least 600,000 credit card records.^[2] Cairn's author, who posts as le1xia0, wrote on X that Cairn was not designed for hacking attacks.^[1]