Researcher: one hacker used AI agents to probe 1,200+ sites, breaching 100+
Snorre Fagerland, principal threat researcher at security firm NorForge, reported that a Chinese-speaking hacker used the open-source AI platform Cairn to orchestrate AI agents against e-commerce sites in the US, Canada, Australia and Japan, attempting more than 1,200 sites since September 25 and succeeding roughly 10% of the time — over 100 breaches. Reuters, which reviewed the report, identified victims including Deere, SharkNinja and Cummins; Deere said it took remediation steps and saw no sign sensitive information was accessed, SharkNinja said a standalone product-support site was hit and contained, and Cummins said it was investigating a possible attack on a vendor-run website. NorForge estimated the campaign consumed about $5,000 in tokens, roughly $50 per successful breach, while calling the estimate highly uncertain; it said tasks ran on a worker named claudecode_deepseek-v4.1-flash, possibly Anthropic's Claude Code running DeepSeek's low-cost V4.1 Flash model. Cairn's author, posting as le1xia0, said on X the multi-agent architecture was not designed for hacking.
Fagerland told Reuters he had assumed hacking agents would still need at least some supervision, calling the development in the field “astounding.”
A cybersecurity researcher watched a Chinese-speaking hacker break into the websites of more than 100 companies, leaving almost all the work to AI agents. 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.
Reuters saw the report before publication and identified some of the victims by reviewing the hacker’s activity, Raphael Satter reported for Reuters. They include farm equipment maker Deere, appliance company SharkNinja and engine maker Cummins. TNW has not independently verified the intrusions.
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