A hacker broke into more than 100 websites using an army of AI agents that mostly operated alone, according to findings from AI security firm Norforge. Although Norforge does not name the targets, Reuters reports that the victims included companies like John Deere, SharkNinja and Cummins.
Norforge researchers discovered the attacks through work exposed on Cairn, an open-source AI platform that describes itself as a “general-purpose problem-solving engine.” With Cairn, users set a starting point and end point for AI agents, which document their progress as they move through the task. However, as Norforge noted, 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, carrying out attacks against companies based in the United States, Canada, Australia and Japan, as reported Reuters. This attacker presented his “favorite intrusion tactics” using fewer than 100 Chinese characters, and successful breaches took approximately 23 hours, according to Reuters. Overall, Norforge found more than 20 exposed Cairn instances that are “probably malicious.”
In a statement to The edgeCummins spokeswoman Melinda Koski said the company was “investigating the report of a potential cyber-attack on a website operated by one of our third-party vendors.” A John Deere spokesperson said Reuters that there is “no indication that sensitive information was accessed” following the attack, while SharkNinja said the breach hit a standalone site containing product support information and contained the threat.
John Deere and SharkNinja did not immediately respond. The edgerequest for comment.
Norforge says it works to remove malicious instances from Cairn. Cairn’s creator, who goes by @le1xia0, said earlier this month that the platform “has never been a ‘hacking tool,'” adding that “misuse is a human decision, not a feature of the engine.”
October 19 update: Added statement from Cummins.
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