One hacker managed to hack the websites of over 100 companies, almost entirely outsourcing the work to artificial intelligence. The AI agents independently searched for vulnerabilities, selected penetration methods, and carried out attacks. All this cost the attacker about $5,000, or about $50 per successful hack.
One hacker managed to hack the websites of over 100 companies, almost entirely outsourcing the work to artificial intelligence. The AI agents independently searched for vulnerabilities, selected penetration methods, and carried out attacks. All this cost the attacker about $5,000, or about $50 per successful hack.
This was reported by Reuters, citing Snorre Fagerland, a cybersecurity researcher at NorForge.
The researcher discovered a hacker who used the Cairn platform to control AI agents. He gave them short instructions that fit into less than 100 Chinese characters. Then the AI acted on its own.
The agents attempted to hack more than 1,200 websites in the US, Canada, Australia and Japan. On average, a successful hack took about 23 hours, during which the AI searched for vulnerabilities and tested various methods of penetration.
During one attack, the agents were unable to find any vulnerabilities on the main website of a large company. But instead of giving up, they began to investigate the systems connected to it. So they came across an online control panel, found an unobvious error in data processing, and after several hours of experimentation were able to force the server to execute malicious commands.
“This is not the level of novice hackers,” said the researcher, who has been working in cybersecurity for nearly 30 years.
It is not yet known whether the breaches resulted in data theft. Among the victims are agricultural equipment maker Deere, home appliance maker SharkNinja and engine maker Cummins. Deere said it found no signs of access to confidential information. SharkNinja said the attack only affected a single product reference site. Cummins is also investigating reports that one of its contractors' sites may have been compromised.
Previously, dev.ua wrote that Chinese hackers stole over 600,000 bank card records using autonomous AI agents.
