1 days of AI noise, one honest wrap.
what the pubs yelled about all week. our read on what was worth hearing.
DAY BY DAY
MONOne Hacker's AI Agents Broke Into More Than 100 Companies' Websites• A Chinese-speaking cybercriminal used AI agents to break into the websites of more than 100 companies, including John Deere, SharkNinja and Cummins, according to a NorForge report seen by Reuters (Oct 19).
• The campaign began Sept 25 against online shops in the U.S., Canada, Japan and Australia. By late last week the agents had gone after more than 1,200 sites, per Reuters.
• The agents ran on Cairn, an open-source AI agent platform. NorForge researcher Snorre Fagerland estimates the campaign appeared to use a mix of Anthropic's Claude Code and China's DeepSeek.
• His cost estimate: about $5,000 in tokens, about $50 per successful hack. A successful intrusion typically took about 23 hours. Fagerland: "It's not script kiddie stuff."
• Per NorForge, the agents aimed to plant a web shell for lasting access to shop and payment systems, per The Next Web.
• Deere says it took "necessary remediation actions" and has "no indication that sensitive information was accessed." SharkNinja says a standalone product-support site was hit and the threat is contained. Cummins is investigating a report about a site run by a third-party vendor. Reuters could not determine how much data, if any, was taken.
• For a small business: the targets were mid-sized online stores.