Security Firm NorForge Reports Hackers Used AI Agents to Autonomously Breach 100+ Companies Across Four Countries

Cybersecurity firm NorForge published an investigation report on October 19, 2026, stating that hackers successfully breached the websites of more than 100 companies in the United States, Canada, Australia, and Japan using AI agents. Affected companies included major names such as John Deere, SharkNinja, and Cummins.

According to the report, attackers provided the AI with less than 100 characters of Chinese prompts, after which the AI agents autonomously searched for target vulnerabilities and attempted intrusions. The attacks primarily utilized "Cairn," an open-source AI platform available on GitHub, integrated with the Chinese AI model "DeepSeek" and Anthropic's "Claude Code."

NorForge estimated that the total token cost for the AI usage during the attack was approximately $5,000, with the cost per successful intrusion being only about $50. The campaign began on September 25, 2026, targeting over 1,200 e-commerce sites with a success rate of around 10%. In successful cases, the time from initiation to completed intrusion averaged about 23 hours.

The report noted that some users left the control panels of Cairn exposed on the public internet without authentication, providing observable and usable instances for attackers. Snorre Fargerland, NorForge's chief threat researcher, discovered more than 20 such public instances.

@le1xia0, the developer of Cairn, responded that the platform was not designed for malicious attacks. NorForge urged organizations to check if their AI agent infrastructure is accidentally exposed and to strengthen default authentication and network isolation.