A hacker used AI agents to break into the websites of over 100 companies

A Chinese-speaking hacker handed almost all the work to AI agents to break into the websites of more than 100 companies, according to a Reuters exclusive of 19 October. Snorre Fagerland, a researcher at NorForge, saw it live after finding exposed instances of Cairn, an open-source agent platform.

Since 25 September, the attacker set the agents against e-commerce sites in four countries, the US, Canada, Australia and Japan, with instructions of under 100 Chinese characters. They attempted to break into more than 1,200 sites; a successful intrusion typically took about 23 hours. Fagerland estimates around $5,000 in tokens, using DeepSeek and Claude Code. These are his figures, and we couldn't read his report.

Reuters identified Deere, SharkNinja and Cummins as victims, and could not tell whether data was extracted. Deere says it has no indication sensitive information was accessed.