Hacker Uses AI Agents to Breach More Than 100 Websites

A Chinese speaking hacker used AI agents to attempt intrusions at more than 1,200 websites and compromise over 100, Reuters reports. Snorre Fagerland, a threat researcher at NorForge, observed the campaign through exposed instances of Cairn, an open source AI problem solving platform.

The campaign began on September 25 and targeted commerce websites in the United States, Canada, Australia and Japan. Successful intrusions typically took about 23 hours. Fagerland estimated that the agents used about $5,000 in tokens from a mixture of DeepSeek and Claude Code, equal to roughly $50 for each successful intrusion.

Reuters identified victims including John Deere, SharkNinja and Cummins. John Deere said it took remediation steps and found no indication that sensitive information was accessed. SharkNinja said the affected site contained only product support information, while Cummins said it was investigating a possible attack on a website operated by a third party vendor. Reuters could not determine whether the breaches resulted in unauthorized data extraction.