A hacker broke into John Deere and SharkNinja with an army of AI agents

A single hacker breached more than 100 websites, including those of John Deere, SharkNinja and Cummins, using an army of AI agents that largely operated autonomously, according to findings from AI security firm Norforge reported by Reuters. Norforge found more than 20 exposed instances of Cairn, an open-source "general-purpose problem-solving engine" that lets users set start and end points for agents, that are "likely malicious," and the most active attacker used fewer than 100 Chinese characters to lay out "preferred intrusion tactics" with successful breaches taking about 23 hours. John Deere said there is "no indication that sensitive information was accessed," Cummins said it is investigating a potential attack on a website run by a third-party vendor, and SharkNinja said the breach hit a standalone product-support site and has been contained.

A hacker broke into more than 100 websites using an army of AI agents that mostly operated on their own, according to findings from the AI security firm Norforge https://norforge.com/blog/inside cairn . Though Norforge doesn’t name the targets, Reuters reports https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/how-one-hacker-used-ai-agents-few-thousand-dollars-break-into-scores-sites-2026-10-19/ that the victims included companies like John Deere, SharkNinja, and Cummins. A hacker broke into John Deere and SharkNinja with an army of AI agents The AI agents carried out the attacks with little involvement from the human hacker. Concerns over AI-powered cybersecurity breaches https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/1001427/ai-is-supercharging-hacking-and-your-local-hospitals-and-banks-arent-ready have grown as the technology grows more advanced, with hackers using the tools to carry out large-scale attacks. At the same time, rogue AI agents are carrying out attacks https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/996563/ai-safety-research-metr-redwood-openai-anthropic of their own after escaping from testing environments. Researchers at Norforge uncovered the attacks through exposed work on Cairn, an open-source AI platform that describes itself https://github.com/oritera/Cairn as a “general-purpose problem-solving engine.” With Cairn, users set a start and end point for the AI agents, which document their progress as they move forward with the task. However, as noted by Norforge, hackers can also use the tool to orchestrate cyberattacks using AI agents. The hacker who broke into more than 100 sites was the “most active” among the exposed Cairn instances discovered by Norforge, waging attacks on companies based in the US, Canada, Australia, and Japan, as reported by Reuters . This attacker laid out “preferred intrusion tactics” using fewer than 100 Chinese characters, with successful breaches taking about 23 hours, according to Reuters . Overall, Nordforge found more than 20 exposed Cairn instances that are “likely malicious.” In a statement to Reuters , a John Deere spokesperson said there is “no indication that sensitive information was accessed” as a result of the attack, while Cummins said it’s “investigating the report of a potential cyber-attack on a website operated by one of our third-party vendors.” Meanwhile, SharkNinja says the breach impacted a standalone site with product support information, and that it has contained the threat. John Deere, Cumms, and SharkNinja didn’t immediately respond to The Verge ’s request for comment. Nordforge says it’s working to get the malicious Cairn instances taken down. Cairn’s creator, who goes by @le1xia0, said earlier this month https://x.com/le1xia0/status/2108155057816641747?s=20 that the platform “was never a ‘hacking tool,’” adding that “misuse is a human decision, not a feature of the engine.” Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.