A Chinese-speaking hacker hired AI agents to hack into more than 100 websites, including those of Deere and SharkNinja, for around $50 per victim

According to researcher Snorre Fagerland (NorForge), bots controlled via the open-source Cairn platform targeted more than 1,200 sites and carried out over a hundred successful intrusions, netting around $5,000 in tokens.

Threat researcher Snorre Fagerland of NorForge published on Monday a report describing a campaign by an attacker writing in Chinese, which left most of the work to AI agents. Since September 25, these officers have attempted to enter more than 1,200 sites in the United States, Canada, Japan and Australia, and have compromised more than 100 sites. Reuters, who had access to the report, identified among the victims Deere, SharkNinja and Cummins. Deere claims to have corrected the flaw without sign of access to sensitive data; SharkNinja evokes an isolated, now secure support site; Cummins examines a possible incident in a claimant.

Cairn, a hijacked multi-agent tool

The attacker relied on Cairn, an open source platform where several agents shared their findings on a common picture. Many operators had left their consoles accessible online, allowing NorForge to spot them by Internet scanning from October 2. The Sinophone group, the most active group, had more than 1,100 attack projects targeting mainly medium-sized online shops: getting code execution, and then filing a small file submission form as a sustainable gateway. All the tasks turned on a worker named claudecode deepseek-v4.1-flash, suggesting Claude Code associated with the DeepSeek V4.1 Flash model. A successful intrusion took an average of just under 23 hours.

The total cost is estimated at approximately $5,000, or about fifty dollars per successful hack, an estimate that NorForge describes as unceremonious. Two other groups were identified, including one Anglophone targeting bank cards and cryptocurrency. The exposed consoles also leaked hundreds of identifiers and API keys from the victims. Cairn's author assures us that his tool was not designed to attack. "The evolution in this area is amazing," says Fagerland, who thought that these officers would still need supervision.