A researcher has documented a Chinese-speaking criminal outsourcing a mass intrusion campaign almost entirely to autonomous AI agents. Snorre Fagerland of NorForge found roughly two dozen exposed instances of Cairn — an open-source AI penetration-testing tool — being used maliciously from about 2 October, letting him read the attackers' shared agent boards in real time. The busiest cluster, AIA0001, linked 14 panels to more than 1,100 attack projects run from instructions of fewer than 100 Chinese characters; typical tasks told the agents to find code execution on a shop and plant a web-shell uploader. By late last week the agents had attempted more than 1,200 sites and reached websites belonging to more than 100 companies, including Deere, SharkNinja and Cummins, which Reuters named and which each said the damage was limited. NorForge independently confirmed a live web shell at a large hardware-parts vendor and a compromise at a very large US retailer; targets sat in the United States, Japan, Australia and Canada, with successful intrusions taking about 23 hours of autonomous probing.

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