SharkNinja Confirms Breach as AI Hacking Tool Campaigns Span US, Asia

SharkNinja confirmed a breach of a standalone product support site after NorForge uncovered more than 20 openly accessible control panels for Cairn, an open-source AI platform being used to conduct automated intrusions against organizations in the US, Japan, and Australia. NorForge identified two attacker clusters using the exposed panels: a Chinese-language group with 14 panels and over 1,100 attack projects targeting e-commerce and payment systems, and an English-language group with 10 panels focused on credit cards and cryptocurrency. The most active attacker breached more than 100 sites, with successful intrusions taking roughly 23 hours and costing approximately $5 in model fees. The dashboards were left open with no password, exposing hundreds of credentials of which 11% were verified as still valid; worker names suggest agents ran on DeepSeek's V4.1 Flash model. Cairn's creator stated the platform was never intended as a hacking tool and that misuse is a human decision. NorForge is working with Reuters to notify affected organizations and pursue removal of the malicious panels.

In a parallel campaign, CrowdStrike attributed a series of data-exfiltration attacks against South Korean financial institutions to an operator using ARTEX, a Chinese-developed open-source AI penetration-testing agent, active from late September to early October 2026. CrowdStrike assessed with moderate confidence that the operator was Chinese-speaking and financially motivated, based on Chinese-language prompts and use of the China-developed tool. Specific targets included a loan-progress inquiry service used by financial brokers and an employee mobile work-support system at separate banks. CrowdStrike stated that the AI models did not independently conduct the breaches and that a human operator used AI-enabled tooling alongside attacker-controlled infrastructure and other offensive techniques. Separately, Ierae examined Japanese attack infrastructure that targeted approximately 20 companies, nearly all in Japan and concentrated in a single industry.