HOLY WTF. Reuters is reporting that a Chinese-speaking hacker used AI agents to compromise websites belonging to more than 100 companies, including Deere, SharkNinja and Cummins, after attempting intrusions against over 1,200 sites.
The estimated cost: roughly $5,000 in AI tokens, or $50 per successful breach. Successful intrusions took around 23 hours on average.
The attackers used the open-source Cairn agent framework, apparently combining DeepSeek models with a Claude Code harness. One campaign gave its agents instructions in fewer than 100 Chinese characters.
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