SI agents breached more than 100 company websites, about $50 per successful break-in, with John Deere, SharkNinja and Cummins among the targets
Prepared by Sintelligent with the help of SI. Published in SI: . Updated: .
Hacking has stopped being expensive: agents do it for the price of lunch per site, so defenders will have to work just as fast and at the same scale.
According to a report by NorForge researcher Snorre Fagerland, a Chinese-speaking hacker ran agents on the open-source Cairn platform starting September 25: of more than 1,200 attempts, over 100 ended in a break-in, at about $50 in tokens per successful breach and roughly $5,000 for the whole campaign. The agents tried to plant web shells (programs for remote command execution) and gain a foothold in shop and payment systems. Hundreds of credentials and API keys were found on open control panels. Reuters confirmed the targets included John Deere, SharkNinja and Cummins: Deere said no sensitive data was affected, SharkNinja said the attack hit a product support site, and Cummins is investigating a possible compromise of a vendor's site. Judging by the name of the worker process, "claudecode_deepseek-v4.1-flash", TNW suggests Claude Code and the DeepSeek V4.1 Flash model were used; this is an inference from the name.
Sources 1