Security firm Norforge: exposed Cairn panels show AI agents hacking sites at scale

Norforge, a security firm, published findings on October 19 about publicly exposed control panels of Cairn, an open-source AI "problem-solving engine" that coordinates AI agents to probe and break into targets. The Verge's coverage, citing Norforge and Reuters, says one attacker used such agents to break into more than 100 websites with little human involvement. Both were shared on Hacker News.

• Norforge's findings: it found more than 20 exposed Cairn panels it assesses as likely malicious, and grouped them into activity clusters. It says the largest, a Chinese-language cluster with 14 panels, had over 1,100 attack projects aimed mainly at e-commerce sites in the US, Japan and Australia. It assesses the activity as financially motivated. It also says it found apparently legitimate red-team work exposed the same way.
• Model used: Norforge says the tasks in that cluster were run by a worker named claudecode_deepseek-v4.1-flash, which it says could mean the Claude Code harness driving DeepSeek's V4.1 Flash model. It estimates the average cost at about $5 per task, with a large margin of error.
• Victims (per the Verge, citing Reuters): the victims included John Deere, SharkNinja and Cummins; Norforge does not name targets. John Deere told Reuters there was no indication sensitive information was accessed. SharkNinja said the breach hit a standalone product-support site and that it contained it. Cummins said it is investigating a potential attack on a third-party vendor's website.
• Norforge says it is withholding the panel addresses until they can be taken down.