NorForge: One Operator's Exposed "Cairn" Agent Panels Show 1,200+ Sites Attacked and 100+ Companies Reached for About $5,000

Web properties in the US, Canada, Australia, and Japan, including sites of Deere, SharkNinja, and Cummins, a large US retailer, and a hardware-parts vendor

Snorre Fagerland of NorForge found about two dozen malicious instances of Cairn, an open-source AI agent tool, through exposed control panels starting around October 2, 2026. The largest cluster, AIA0001, tied 14 panels to more than 1,100 attack projects run by a Chinese-speaking operator with instructions of under 100 characters. Agents tried more than 1,200 sites and reached more than 100 companies, mostly aiming for code execution on web shops and planting web-shell uploaders. About 10% of attempts succeeded, successful break-ins took just under 23 hours on average, and tasks cost about $5 each, roughly $50 per successful hack and about $5,000 in tokens overall. Hundreds of secrets sat in the panel data, 11% still valid. The worker was named "claudecode_deepseek-v4.1-flash"; the models are unconfirmed. This is a separate operation from the Cairn card-skimming campaign reported in September

An open-source autonomous agent tool repurposed for unattended web exploitation at scale against unpatched shop software