Autonomous AI agents used to breach more than 1,200 websites
Original title: Hackers Use Autonomous AI Agents to Breach Company Websites, Target Over 1,200 Sites
NorForge says exposed Cairn panels tied a Chinese-language cluster to web shells at named firms, with data theft unconfirmed.
Researcher Snorre Fagerland of NorForge found about two dozen internet-exposed copies of the open-source agent tool Cairn being used to attack websites, Reuters reported. The busiest Chinese-language cluster, AIA0001, linked 14 panels to more than 1,100 projects aimed at lasting access to shops and payment systems. Agents reached sites of more than 100 companies, including Deere, SharkNinja and Cummins; those firms described limited or unconfirmed impact. How much data was taken is unknown. Open panels also exposed attack details and hundreds of secrets.
Unconfirmed: Models behind the claudecode_deepseek-v4.1-flash worker, token costs, and whether any data was stolen are unconfirmed.
- Successful break-ins averaged a little under 23 hours, with about a 10% success rate.
- NorForge verified one live web shell and one US retailer compromise via a cookie selecting a vulnerable backend.
- One intrusion used memcached session writes, unsafe PHP objects and old Zend Framework code.
- A Magento PoC for CVE-2026-75650 was on a worker host, with no evidence it was used.
- Trufflehog found hundreds of secrets on the panels; 11% still verified as valid.
Impact: Web-shell footholds and exposed credentials on attacked sites
| Product | Affected | Fixed in |
|---|---|---|
| Adobe Commerce | 2.4.4 through 2.4.9 | Adobe hotfix |
| Magento Open Source | 2.4.6 through | — |
- 1.Look for exposed agent panels, often on port 8000, and unexpected hidden file-upload forms.
- 2.Apply Adobe’s hotfix on affected Adobe Commerce or Magento Open Source builds.
- Products
- Cairn
- Threat actors
- AIA0001
- Victims
- DeereSharkNinjaCummins
- Organizations
- NorForge
- Countries
- United StatesJapanAustralia
From the original article
5 min read at thehackernews.com
A Chinese-speaking criminal pointed autonomous AI agents at company websites and let them break in with almost no help, and a security researcher watched it happen because the operators left their control panels open on the internet. The agents tried more than 1,200 sites and reached websites belonging to more than 100 companies, including farm-equipment maker Deere, appliance company
thehackernews.com
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