AI agents hacked 100+ companies at ~$50 per breach, avg 23 hours — attacker dashboards left open
AccBalanced · x · 2026-10-20
What happened
Reuters reports that a Chinese-speaking hacking group used autonomous AI agents to compromise websites of 100+ companies, including Deere, SharkNinja and Cummins, after attempting intrusions against over 1,200 sites.
Key numbers
- Total cost: roughly $5,000 in AI tokens — about $50 per successful breach
- Average time: 23 hours per successful intrusion
- Stack: open-source Cairn agent framework, DeepSeek models combined with a Claude Code harness; one campaign's agent instructions fit in fewer than 100 Chinese characters
The ironic twist
The attackers forgot to password-protect their own agent dashboards: researchers found 20 exposed dashboards and could literally watch the agents work in real time. NorForge researcher Snorre Fagerland: "It's a new world now."
Related event: Hacker Uses AI Agents to Breach Over 100 Company Websites on the Cheap(4 posts)→
More from Models
- REAX inference engine runs Perplexity Decider up to 6x faster, free for individuals — airesearch12 · 2026-10-20
- SKY-001 debuts as first 'Engineering World Model,' claiming 125x speedup over GPT-6 on CAD — vasuman · 2026-10-20
- Smart glasses test: Octen search at 60ms, model generation is the bottleneck; Mercury 3 wins — Scobleizer · 2026-10-20
- BitNet CPU inference is silently wrong: perplexity 6x reference, one-line fix works — matheus-c-feitosa · 2026-10-20
- Space Bunny stealth model revealed as MiniMax M3.1 Flash: 428B-A23B, weights Thursday — BTA_Labs · 2026-10-20
- Clairic is live on Workers AI; open-weights release planned once the architecture matures — michellechen · 2026-10-20