AI agents broke into over 100 company sites, report says

A Chinese-speaking hacker used AI agents to break into websites belonging to more than 100 companies, including Deere, SharkNinja and Cummins, Reuters reported Monday, citing Snorre Fagerland, principal threat researcher at cybersecurity company NorForge. NorForge laid out the findings in a report on exposed control panels for Cairn, an open-source AI system that coordinates agents to probe and break into targets.

What NorForge found: NorForge said more than 20 exposed Cairn panels were likely tied to malicious activity. The most active cluster, which uses Chinese, ran more than 1,100 attack projects across 14 panels, mostly against targets in the U.S., Japan and Australia, the report said. NorForge said that group appears to be after persistent access to e-commerce and payment infrastructure.

How the agents worked: The group’s tasks told agents to find ways to run code on sites and plant an uploader web shell, according to NorForge. The report said every task ran on a worker named “claudecode_deepseek-v4.1-flash,” which it said could mean a Claude Code harness using DeepSeek’s 4.1 Flash model. Beginning Sept. 25, the hacker’s agents attempted to break into more than 1,200 sites in the U.S., Canada, Australia and Japan, Reuters reported.

The numbers: NorForge put the average success rate across the campaigns it saw at around 10%, and said successful projects in the Chinese-language cluster took a little under 23 hours from start to goal. It estimated an average task cost about $5 in model usage, though it said the uncertainty is considerable.

“A new world”: Fagerland told Reuters the find was real-life evidence that commercially available AI agents could carry out complex intrusions from start to finish without human intervention. “It’s a new world now,” he said.

What victims said: Deere told Reuters it had taken “necessary remediation actions” and had “no indication that sensitive information was accessed.” SharkNinja said the hack hit a standalone site carrying only product support information and that the threat had been contained, Reuters reported. Cummins said it was “investigating the report of a potential cyber-attack on a website operated by one of our third-party vendors.” Reuters said it could not determine how much data, if any, was taken.

Exposed secrets: NorForge said it ran the Trufflehog scanner over data from the open panels and found hundreds of secrets, 11% of which Trufflehog verified as valid.

What’s next: NorForge said it is working with Reuters to notify victims and is trying to get the panels taken down, which it said depends on how hosting providers respond.

Earlier coverage

• OpenCode says breach hit 1.4% of Console users