A Hacker Broke Into John Deere, SharkNinja With an Army of AI Agents

An anonymous report from The Verge reveals that a hacker infiltrated over 100 websites using an army of AI agents, according to Norforge, an AI security firm. While Norforge does not disclose the targets, Reuters states that victims included companies such as John Deere, SharkNinja, and Cummins. Researchers from Norforge discovered the attacks by investigating Cairn, an open-source AI platform designed for general-purpose problem-solving.

Cairn allows users to specify start and end points for AI agents, which log their progress throughout the task. However, hackers can exploit the platform to carry out cyberattacks. The most active Cairn instance involved in these attacks targeted companies located in the US, Canada, Australia, and Japan, as reported by Reuters. This attacker devised a concise set of preferred intrusion tactics, using fewer than 100 Chinese characters.

Successful breaches typically took around 23 hours. Norforge identified more than 20 exposed Cairn instances, many of which are likely malicious. John Deere claimed no sensitive information was accessed during the attack, while Cummins stated it is investigating a potential cyber-attack on a third-party vendor's website. SharkNinja reported that the breach affected a separate site with product support information and that they had contained the threat.