A single Chinese-speaking hacker used AI agents to break into the websites of more than 100 companies, Reuters reports

A single Chinese-speaking hacker broke into the websites of more than 100 companies while AI agents did most of the work, Reuters reported in an exclusive on October 19. Snorre Fagerland, principal threat researcher at NorForge, uncovered the campaign while scanning for exposed control panels of Cairn, an open-source AI problem-solving platform. The hacker gave the agents terse instructions of fewer than 100 Chinese characters. Starting September 25, the agents targeted e-commerce sites in the US, Canada, Australia and Japan and attempted to break into more than 1,200 sites.

NorForge’s report says all tasks ran on a worker named “claudecode_deepseek-v4.1-flash,” which it says could mean Anthropic’s Claude Code harness running DeepSeek’s V4.1 Flash model. Successful attacks took just under 23 hours on average. Fagerland estimated the cost at roughly $5,000 in tokens, or about $50 per successful hack. The NorForge report puts the average at about $5 per task, including failed attempts, and says the uncertainty is considerable.

Reuters identified sites linked to Deere, SharkNinja and Cummins by reviewing the hacker’s Cairn activity. Deere said it found no indication that sensitive information was accessed, and SharkNinja said only a standalone product support site was hit. Cummins is investigating a possible attack on a vendor-run site. Reuters could not determine how much data was taken. Separately, Microsoft said on October 21 that China-state aligned actor Storm-0940 used ARTEX, an open-source agentic penetration testing framework, to automate attacks on hundreds of organizations.