A Chinese-speaking hacker broke into websites belonging to more than 100 companies, including John Deere, SharkNinja and Cummins, while leaving almost all of the work to autonomous AI agents running on an open-source platform called Cairn, Reuters reported on Monday, Oct. 19.

Snorre Fagerland, principal threat researcher at NorForge, found the campaign while scanning the web for Cairn control panels that operators had left exposed. His report , published the same day, identified more than 20 exposed Cairn panels as likely malicious. It did not name the victims. Reuters identified them by independently reviewing the hacker’s Cairn activity.

“It’s a new world now,” Fagerland told Reuters.

Short instructions, long runs

Beginning Sept. 25, the hacker set the agents loose on e-commerce sites in the U.S., Canada, Australia and Japan, using instructions of fewer than 100 Chinese characters.…