Exposed Cairn AI panels reveal attacks on 1,100 targets

Security researchers have uncovered more than 20 unsecured Cairn AI panels on the public internet, exposing over 1,100 automated attack projects targeting online retailers and payment systems worldwide. NorForge and Gambit Security led the investigation after traces of an AI-driven hacking framework were identified on attacker staging servers running Hermes, Strix and Cairn. The exposed dashboards were found via scans of Shodan and Censys, with several panels operated by legitimate red teams also visible.

NorForge describes Cairn as an AI-powered hacking system that coordinates multiple AI agents to investigate targets, search for weaknesses and attempt intrusions, with outcomes posted to a shared digital blackboard as the attack progresses.

Investigators found evidence of automated exploitation and tooling run inside Kali Linux containers, using Nmap, ffuf, OWASP Amass, PHPGGC and a PoC exploit for Magento StyleSmuggler (CVE-2026-75650). Before engaging Cairn, attackers reportedly verified target stores with Microsoft Playwright.

In a verified intrusion against a major U.S. hardware parts vendor, an agent leveraged unauthorized write access to a memcached session store and unsafe PHP object deserialization in legacy Zend Framework components to upload an HTML file uploader webshell. NorForge estimates an average cost of about £5 per attack task using the DeepSeek 4.1 Flash model, rising to around £100 for multi-day operations.

Across clusters, AIA0001 (the largest) operated in Chinese and ran over 1,100 tasks across 14 dashboards hosted by Cgi Global Limited (AS56594); AIA0002 ran 10 English-language panels on Vultr via The Constant Company (AS20473); AIA0003 operated 59 projects on an AlexHost panel (AS200019) targeting U.S. sites.

The analysis notes 11% of leaked credentials were active, including victim API keys, database passwords and root SSH logins to the criminals’ staging servers. Reuters and NorForge have begun notifying affected companies and pursuing takedowns of exposed Cairn panels. In response, researchers emphasise the importance of applying updates to Magento, Odoo and legacy PHP frameworks and restricting access to exposed directories and memcached servers. Researchers also recommend that legitimate pentesters keep management dashboards behind strict authentication and VPNs to prevent inadvertent leakage.