GoKawiilCairn AI agent swarm used to breach over 100 companies including Deere, SharkNinja
Cybersecurity researcher Snorre Fagerland of NorForge found that a Chinese-speaking hacker used autonomous AI agents built on an open-source tool called Cairn to attack more than 1,200 e-commerce sites across the US, Canada, Australia and Japan, successfully breaching over 100 companies including John Deere, SharkNinja and Cummins. Each successful breach reportedly cost about $50 in computing tokens after roughly 23 hours of automated attacks, and one Cairn-assisted hacker made off with credit card data. Deere and SharkNinja confirmed breaches but said sensitive information did not appear to be compromised.
GoKawiil's interpretation of the reporting above, not reported fact.
The incident suggests that AI agents can let a single attacker run sophisticated, sustained hacking campaigns at a fraction of the cost and effort previously required, according to Fagerland, who called the techniques 'not script kiddie stuff.' This could lower the barrier for cybercrime at scale, pressuring companies to rethink automated-threat detection as agentic AI tools become more widely available and abused.
- A Chinese-speaking hacker used Cairn-based AI agents to breach over 100 companies among 1,200+ targeted e-commerce sites.
- Successful breaches cost roughly $50 in AI tokens and took about 23 hours of automated effort.
- Researcher Snorre Fagerland says the AI-driven techniques were sophisticated, not amateur, signaling a shift in the cyberthreat landscape.
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Published there as: “Man Hires Swarm of AI Agents to Go on Epic Hacking Spree Against Major Companies”
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