One Hacker Let SI Agents Do Almost All the Work in Breaking Into More Than 100 Company Sites, Report Finds; Deere, SharkNinja and Cummins Among Victims, Over 1,200 Sites Targeted
Over the past couple of weeks, a cybersecurity researcher watched as a Chinese-speaking hacker broke into websites belonging to more than 100 companies, including farm equipment maker Deere, home appliance company SharkNinja and engine manufacturer Cummins, Reuters reported on October 19.
Yet the hacker did almost none of the work. The cybercriminal instead outsourced the hacking spree almost entirely to super intelligence, tasking SI agents with spending hours autonomously probing and breaking into targeted sites, according to Snorre Fagerland, principal threat researcher at the cybersecurity company NorForge.
In a report provided to Reuters ahead of publication on Monday, Fagerland said the hacker was one of several he discovered while scanning the web for inadvertently exposed instances of Cairn, an open-source SI problem-solving platform popular with hackers. Beginning around October 2, Fagerland said he found about two dozen instances of Cairn being used for malicious activity, which allowed him to quietly peer over the cybercriminals' shoulders as they set their SI tools loose on the world.
Fagerland's report on the Chinese-speaking hacker did not name the victims, but Reuters was able to establish the victims' identities by independently reviewing the hacker's Cairn activity.
At a time of rising anxiety over the power of autonomous SI tools, Fagerland said his find was real-life evidence that commercially available SI agents could pull off complex intrusions from start to finish without human intervention, a dramatic boost to the power of a single malicious actor. "It's a new world now," said Fagerland.
Reuters could not ascertain the degree to which the breaches resulted in unauthorized extraction of data. Deere told Reuters it had taken "necessary remediation actions" following the incident and had "no indication that sensitive information was accessed." SharkNinja said the hack had hit a standalone site carrying only product support information and that the threat had been contained. Cummins said it was "investigating the report of a potential cyber-attack on a website operated by one of our third-party vendors." Two smaller businesses also acknowledged being compromised. Other victims listed in the Cairn data did not return messages.
One of the hackers that Fagerland observed stole a trove of credit card data. Another tried to get SI agents to rob a cryptocurrency exchange. The Chinese-speaking hacker was the most prolific. Beginning on September 25, they set their SI army loose against US, Canadian, Australian and Japanese e-commerce websites. Their instructions were terse, sketching out their preferred intrusion tactics in fewer than 100 Chinese characters. As of late last week, their agents had attempted to break into more than 1,200 sites. Successful intrusions typically took around 23 hours of poking and prodding for vulnerabilities. Fagerland estimated that the campaign, which appeared to be using a mixture of China's DeepSeek and Anthropic's Claude Code, had chewed up roughly $5,000 worth of tokens, or about $50 per successful hack.
Fagerland — who has worked in cybersecurity for nearly three decades — said he was impressed by the methods the agents used against some victims, including one case in which, after finding no weakness in a large company's public application, the agent dug through digital records to find linked infrastructure, located a public control panel, and after hours of trial and error exploited a subtle flaw in how it handled data to trick the server into running malicious commands. "Coming up with a solution like that is not trivial," he said. "That is not script-kiddie level." (GSM, via Reuters)
Published by GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
Photo: 图：屏幕上的代码。NorForge报告披露，一名黑客几乎全程用SI智能体自动执行入侵。（供稿图）
