Man Hires Swarm of AI Agents to Go on Epic Hacking Spree Against Major Companies

A Chinese-speaking cybercriminal used autonomous AI agents built on an open source tool called Cairn to attack more than 100 companies, including John Deere, SharkNinja and Cummins, according to a NorForge researcher cited by Reuters. The hacker deployed agents against over 1,200 e-commerce sites in the US, Canada, Australia and Japan, with successful breaches after about 23 hours of attack and each success costing roughly $50 in tokens. The companies said they took remediation actions or were investigating, and the researcher described the agents' techniques as sophisticated rather than "script kiddie stuff."