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One hacker. Fewer than a hundred characters of instructions. And over a hundred company websites broken into — by agents, running unsupervised, at fifty dollars a pop.
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The Signal Brief
Reuters reports a Chinese-speaking hacker broke into the websites of more than one hundred companies — Deere, SharkNinja, and Cummins among them — while doing almost none of the work himself.
Here's how: he used an open-source platform called Cairn, which lets you hand AI agents a starting point and a goal, and lets them work toward it step by step. His instructions were written in fewer than one hundred Chinese characters: find a way to run code on each site, then plant an uploader shell. From there, the agents worked unsupervised — probing, testing, breaking in. Each successful intrusion took about twenty-three hours of automated work. The researcher who caught it — Snorre Fagerland at NorForge — estimates the whole campaign cost about five thousand dollars in AI tokens. Fifty dollars per successful hack.