Attackers aimed cheap AI agents at mid-sized online stores. Successful breaches took about 23 hours

The attackers' agents were cheap, patient and aimed at mid-sized online shops.

What happened

Security firm NorForge found more than 20 publicly exposed control panels for Cairn, an open source AI platform, that it assessed as likely used for malicious operations. Users give Cairn a start point and a goal, and its AI agents work toward it, posting what they discover to a shared board. The Verge, citing Reuters, reports that victims included companies such as John Deere, SharkNinja and Cummins. SharkNinja said the breach hit a standalone product support site, and Cummins said it was investigating a site run by a third-party vendor.

NorForge says the most active group ran over 1,100 attack projects across 14 dashboards, targeting e-commerce sites in the US, Canada, Japan and Australia with traffic of 200,000 to 1.5 million. Its tasks asked agents to find ways to run code on the site and plant a web shell. In one case NorForge describes, the agent's own explanation said the break-in used an exposed session store and unsafe code in legacy Zend Framework components. Successful projects took a little under 23 hours on average, and NorForge estimates an average cost of around $5 per task. It estimates success rates around 10%. The exposed panels also leaked hundreds of secrets, 11% of which a scanner verified as valid.

My take

The target list is the lesson. These were not banks. They were mid-sized online stores and vendor-run support sites, the kind of sites small agencies and freelancers build and then stop maintaining.

If you manage sites or automations for clients, a few checks are worth doing this week:

• List every site and microsite you built, including old campaign and support pages
• Update or retire legacy plugins, frameworks and checkout extensions
• Make sure no admin panel, n8n editor or dashboard is open to the internet without login
• Keep secrets out of task notes, prompts and tickets, since those get exposed too

An attack that costs around $5 and runs for a day can be aimed at thousands of sites. The defense is boring maintenance, done on a schedule instead of after an incident.