Researcher watches one hacker use AI agents to break into more than 100 company websites
NorForge says the Chinese-speaking attacker left nearly all the work to agents on the open-source Cairn platform. Reuters identified Deere, SharkNinja and Cummins among the victims.
Evidence: Independent reports. Security stories run only with a named disclosure or independent reporting behind them.
A Chinese-speaking hacker broke into the websites of more than 100 companies over roughly two weeks while handing almost all of the work to AI agents, according to Snorre Fagerland, principal threat researcher at the security firm NorForge. His report, published Monday and shared with Reuters in advance, centers on Cairn, an open-source AI problem-solving platform. Cairn takes a target and a goal, then assigns agents that work toward it step by step and post their findings to a shared board that every agent and the human operator can read. Operators set the targets and can add hints. Many of them left their Cairn control panels exposed on the web. Fagerland found them with internet scanning tools and, starting around October 2, identified about two dozen instances being used for malicious activity. That let him watch the attacks as they happened. The report did not name victims, but Reuters identified some of them by reviewing the hacker's Cairn activity. They include farm equipment maker Deere, appliance company SharkNinja and engine maker Cummins. Deere said it had taken remediation steps and saw no sign that sensitive information was accessed. SharkNinja said a standalone product support site was hit and the threat was contained. Cummins said it was looking into a report about a website run by one of its vendors. Reuters could not establish how much data, if any, was taken. Fagerland called the case real-world evidence of what commercially available AI agents can do in an attack.