Autonomous AI Agents Hack Retailers for $25 and Steal 600,000 Credit Cards
Gambit Security details an unsupervised AI-agent campaign using Strix, Cairn and Hermes that breached 27+ retailers and stole 600,000+ credit cards for about $25 per target.
A financially motivated operator ran three open-source AI agents (Strix for scanning, Cairn for exploitation, Hermes for orchestration) against online retailers from July 2026, compromising at least 27 companies and extracting over 600,000 credit card records, roughly 488,000 of them US cards. Mean cost per completed scan was $25.46 via OpenRouter, with heavy work routed to DeepSeek and Kimi after newer models refused. A documented chain used unauthenticated SQL injection, a web shell, sudo misconfiguration escalation, AWS Secrets Manager dumping, and Magento encryption-key theft to decrypt stored cards. The operator also planted skimmers on 19 named victims plus 100+ sites and wiped victim databases, and the campaign remains active.
- AI agents ran autonomous end-to-end intrusions with minimal human input
- 600,000+ cards stolen; 79% belonged to US holders
- Marginal cost averaged $25.46 per target across 101 scans
- Skimmers deployed via jQuery files, S3 buckets, Kubernetes initContainers and cron jobs
- Agent destroyed victim data, dropping 180 tables at one retailer
- ATT&CK
- T1190 Exploit Public-Facing ApplicationT1505.003 Server Software Component: Web ShellT1548.003 Abuse Elevation Control Mechanism: Sudo and Sudo CachingT1555.006 Credentials from Password Stores: Cloud Secrets Management StoreT1485 Data Destruction
- AI models
- Kimi
From the original article
4 min read at cybersecuritynews.com
A financially motivated operator has been running three open-source AI tools against many online retailers, mostly without supervision. The results are shocking: over 600,000 credit card records have been stolen, scripts to gather card information have been placed on dozens of checkout pages, and in at least two cases, the operator’s cleanup routine completely wiped […]
By Guru Baran · cybersecuritynews.com
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