Hacker used AI agents to breach 100+ sites, including John Deere: Report
The campaign used Cairn, DeepSeek and Claude Code and attempted more than 1,200 breaches for about $5,000 in tokens, Fagerland said.
- On Monday, NorForge researcher Snorre Fagerland reported a Chinese-speaking hacker used autonomous AI agents to breach websites belonging to more than 100 companies, including John Deere, SharkNinja, and Cummins.
- The cybercriminal outsourced the hacking spree to artificial intelligence, using the open-source platform Cairn to task agents with probing vulnerabilities using fewer than 100 Chinese characters of instructions.
- Successful breaches typically took around 23 hours of autonomous probing, and Fagerland estimated the campaign cost roughly $5,000 in AI tokens, or about $50 per successful intrusion.
- Deere reported "no indication that sensitive information was accessed" after taking "necessary remediation actions," while Cummins stated it is "investigating the report of a potential cyber-attack on a website operated by one of our third-party vendors."
- AI agents are increasingly becoming staples of the cybercriminal underground; Fagerland, who has worked in cybersecurity for nearly three decades, said "It's a new world now" as the technology reshapes threat landscapes.
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Researcher Snorre Fagerland believes that his finding is proof that the AI agents available on the market are capable of carrying out complex cyberattacks without human involvement.
Hacker Used AI Agents to Breach John Deere, SharkNinja and Cummins Sites
A Chinese-speaking hacker directed AI agents on the Cairn platform to breach more than 100 corporate websites, including those of John Deere, SharkNinja and Cummins. The campaign, which began Sept. 25, cost about $50 per success and required little ongoing human input after initial instructions of under 100 characters. Companies report limited impact and remediation steps. NorForge detailed the operation in a new report.
In recent weeks, a cybersecurity researcher has been tracking how a Chinese language hacker has hacked into the websites of over 100 companies, including the manufacturer...
"We Live in a New World. One Hacker Has Compromised the Websites of More than 100 Companies with AI.
A hacker managed to compromise the websites of more than 100 companies, using artificial intelligence agents who carried out the attacks almost completely without human intervention. The campaign, which targeted more than 1,200 sites in several countries, would...
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