AI agent incident
Exposed Cairn panels showed AI agents running more than 1,100 attack projects against online shops
What happened
NorForge found more than 20 internet-exposed control panels for Cairn, an open-source tool that sets AI agents working step by step toward a goal, that it judged likely malicious. The busiest cluster, which works in Chinese, ran more than 1,100 attack projects across 14 panels, mostly against online shops in the US, Canada, Japan and Australia, with tasks telling agents to find a way to run code and plant an uploader web shell. NorForge confirmed one such shell live on a hardware parts vendor's site. Reuters, reviewing the operator's records, said the agents reached websites of more than 100 companies, among them Deere and SharkNinja; Cummins said it was looking into a possible attack on a vendor's website.
Why it matters
Every task NorForge saw in that cluster ran on a worker whose name points to Claude Code running DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, and it estimated, with wide uncertainty, about $5 a task, cheap enough to try every shop on a list. The operators left their own panels open, leaking hundreds of their targets' secrets, 11% verified valid, along with controls that appeared able to redirect the agents. Legitimate red teams had left client work exposed the same way, so an open harness panel leaks a client's secrets whoever runs it.