One hacker. A swarm of AI agents. More than 100 companies

This week Snorre Fagerland at NorForge laid out how a Chinese-speaking hacker let AI agents do almost the entire job. The agents tried more than 1,200 websites and got into more than 100 companies, among them Deere and Cummins. The price was around 50 dollars per break-in.

At the same time, October has been an unusually heavy month. Critical holes in PHP, which runs a large share of the world’s websites. Secret keys at a certificate authority compromised. Data on all of California’s roughly 7 million public school students stolen.

It is easy to read this as the internet falling apart. It is not. Not yet, at least. But something has changed.

AI has made it cheap to find bugs. Microsoft disclosed 1,415 vulnerabilities in October, against around 100 a month before June. Cisco Talos points out that AI models are now ploughing through decades of old code.

AI has also made it cheap to attack. Cairn shows that.

But fixing the bugs is still just as slow. Every update has to be tested, approved and rolled out by humans. That seems to be where the bottleneck is now.

For now there is one consolation: of the 975 vulnerabilities Microsoft disclosed in September, only 3 were actually exploited. Finding a bug is not the same as using it. Yet.

Note what the attackers are after. Railway, Zeabur, LiteLLM and OpenCode are all places where developers store the keys to AI services. Railway itself writes that the attack is part of a series aimed at platform companies, with the goal of getting into the AI providers. The goal is access to AI.

Dax Raad, who builds the AI coding agent OpenCode, wrote after they were attacked themselves: “The only reason we survive is that we have agents working around the clock. We still barely sleep.” The time defenders have to react has become too short for humans alone.

What you can do this week:

• Update everything: browser, operating system, phone and apps.
• Be extra sceptical of emails offering “certificate fixes”.
• Clean up old projects, test environments and keys you have forgotten. The attackers will find them.
• Developer? Update your package managers, and rotate keys if you use Railway or Zeabur, or installed LiteLLM 1.107.0.
• If you have an iPhone 11–16, it may be wise to turn off Bluetooth until more is known. The advice is based on a leaked document and has not been confirmed by Apple.

How quickly can your organisation roll out a critical update?

Read more about Cairn: https://lnkd.in/etcvAmy3