Rank #10 of 33·Security·19 Oct 2026·AI agents on the open-source Cairn platform

One hacker, under 100 characters of orders: AI agents break into the websites of 100+ companies

A Deere tractor, for illustration; the attack hit a Deere website, not its machines. Photo: Acroterion, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons; cropped, text overlaid.

“Fewer than 100 characters of instructions, more than 100 break-ins. Great ratio, terrible hobby.”

Incident reportSecurityOnline shops in the US, Canada, Australia and Japan

Agent / toolAI agents on the open-source Cairn platform

CompanyDeere, SharkNinja, Cummins and others (victims)

Damage100+ company sites breached, 1,200+ tried

Time to detectAbout a week (NorForge found open panels ~2 Oct)

StatusVictims notified; panel takedowns requested

Chaos8.0 / 10

Agents tried more than 1,200 sites from 25 September
Deere, SharkNinja and Cummins among the victims
The hackers' own open panels leaked hundreds of secrets

One Chinese-speaking hacker wrote fewer than 100 characters of instructions. AI agents did the rest, and more than 100 companies got hacked.

What happened

From 25 September 2026, the hacker pointed AI agents at online shops in the US, Canada, Australia and Japan using Cairn, an open-source platform where agents chase a goal step by step and post every discovery to a shared board. An automated pipeline fed in targets: real shops with 200,000 to 1.5 million visitors, pre-checked to confirm orders worked. The goal: find a way to run code on the site, then plant a simple file-upload backdoor for later. Every task ran on a worker called 'claudecode_deepseek-v4.1-flash', which NorForge says could mean Claude Code driving DeepSeek's cheap model.

The damage

By late last week the agents had tried more than 1,200 sites and got into the websites of more than 100 companies. Reuters, which saw the report early, identified Deere, SharkNinja and Cummins among them. Successful break-ins took a little under 23 hours on average, and NorForge's Snorre Fagerland put the token bill at about $5,000, roughly $50 per hack. In one case, finding no hole in a big company's app, the agents tracked down a linked control panel and forced it to run commands. "It's not script kiddie stuff," he said.

How it was caught, and what happened next

Deere says it found no sign sensitive data was accessed, SharkNinja says a standalone support site was hit and contained, and Cummins is investigating a vendor-run site. The twist: the hackers left their own doors open. More than 20 likely malicious Cairn panels sat exposed online, leaking targets and hundreds of secrets, 11% verified as valid. NorForge is notifying victims and pushing for takedowns.

Lesson for builders

One person with cheap agents can now test you like a whole crew. Patch like they're already knocking.