# AI agents hack 100+ sites for Chinese hacker

> A researcher watched AI agents break into over 100 company websites with minimal human oversight, costing just $50 per successful hack.
- Title: AI agents hack 100+ sites for Chinese hacker · The Next Web
- Summary: A researcher watched AI agents break into over 100 company websites with minimal human oversight, costing just $50 per successful hack. A Chinese-speaking…
- Keywords: ai agents, hacking campaign, cairn platform, cybersecurity, norforge, deere, sharkninja, cummins, web shells, credential theft, technology, startups
- Source: The Next Web — https://thenextweb.com/news/ai-agents-hacker-cairn-100-sites-deere-norforge
- Author: Ana Maria Constantin
- Published: 2026-10-19T13:58:43+00:00
- Read time: 1 min
- Topics: ai agents, hacking campaign, cairn platform, cybersecurity, norforge, deere, sharkninja, cummins, web shells, credential theft, technology, startups
## Researcher spots AI hacking campaign
Snorre Fagerland, principal threat researcher at NorForge, discovered a Chinese-speaking hacker using AI agents to break into over one hundred company websites. The hacker left almost all the work to AI.
## Major companies targeted
Reuters identified victims including farm equipment maker Deere, appliance company SharkNinja and engine maker Cummins. Deere said it took remediation steps with no sign of sensitive data access.
## How Cairn works
Cairn is an open-source AI problem-solving platform. It takes a target and goal, then sets AI agents to work step by step. Each agent posts findings to a shared board that all agents can read.
## Campaign timeline and scale
NorForge found exposed Cairn control panels starting around October two.The Chinese-speaking hacker's campaign had started on September twenty-fifth.
## Attack method and cost
Agents targeted online shops in the US, Canada, Japan and Australia with traffic of two hundred thousand to one point five million.
## Sophistication of the attacks
Successful attacks took a little under twenty-three hours on average. In one case, agents found no flaw in a large company's public-facing application, so they hunted down a linked control panel and tricked its server…

> It's not script kiddie stuff.
## Other attack clusters found
A second group wrote in English and told agents to steal credit cards and cryptocurrency, linked to ten panels.A third cluster of one panel with fifty-nine projects is malicious only with low confidence.
## Exposed secrets and next steps
Open panels leaked hundreds of credentials, API keys and other secrets from targets.Trufflehog verified eleven percent of exposed secrets as valid.
## Key takeaway

A Chinese-speaking hacker used AI agents on the Cairn platform to break into over 100 company websites, including Deere, SharkNinja and Cummins, spending roughly fifty dollars per successful intrusion.