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AI agents hit over 100 websites including John Deere, researchers say
Security firm Norforge says it found more than 20 exposed Cairn AI agent panels used to run cyberattacks on hundreds of sites, with The Verge reporting that Reuters named John Deere, SharkNinja, and Cummins among the targets.
Image: Norforge
Why it mattersAny team shipping an agent harness that reads a public panel URL now has a worked example of what happens when a user leaves one on the open internet, with averages for how long an attack takes and how often it works.
Someone used an off-the-shelf AI agent harness to run cyberattacks against more than 100 websites, with the AI agents doing most of the work themselves, The Verge reports, citing a new report from the security firm Norforge. Reuters, in reporting The Verge cites, named John Deere, SharkNinja, and Cummins among the targets.
Norforge says it found more than 20 exposed public control panels of Cairn, an open-source AI agent harness whose developer describes it as a general-purpose problem-solving engine. The developer, who posts under the handle le1xia0, has said that Cairn was never a hacking tool and that misuse is a human decision rather than a feature of the engine.
What Norforge found
The report groups the exposed panels into three clusters. The largest, which Norforge labels AIA0001, is 14 panels running Chinese-language prompts, aimed at e-commerce and payment infrastructure in the US, Japan and Australia. Across those 14 panels, Norforge counts more than 1,100 attack projects, with each project averaging 140 recorded facts collected from the target as the agents worked.
AIA0001 projects that reached their stated goal took "a little under 23h" on average, Norforge writes, and the firm puts the goal-success rate across the cluster at 10 percent. The attack playbook asks the agents to find a way in through SQL injection, file upload, deserialisation, authentication bypass, or a webshell drop, and then to keep the access for later use. The other two clusters, AIA0002 with 10 English-language panels aimed at financial and cryptocurrency sites, and AIA0003 with one panel in an exploratory stage, together account for the rest of the activity Norforge classes as malicious.
What the named companies said
John Deere told Reuters it has "no indication that sensitive information was accessed" after the attack it recorded, The Verge wrote. Cummins said it is "investigating the report of a potential cyber-attack on a website operated by one of our third-party vendors", and SharkNinja said the breach hit a standalone product-support site, which it has since contained. None had responded to The Verge's own request for comment at publication, and Norforge's report does not name any victim company.
Norforge says it is working to get the malicious panels taken down. Every one of them was reachable because a user left a Cairn panel open on the public internet, which is how Norforge discovered them in the first place. The firm also found several Cairn panels it classes as legitimate red team work, and says those too can expose a client's intrusion plan to anyone who happens on the URL.
Source
Emma Roth, The Verge. Primary source: Snorre, Norforge, "Inside Cairn".
This item was written by an AI system from the linked source. Reveneau is responsible for what it publishes.
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