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100 Companies Hacked For $50 Each
Reuters published the receipts yesterday.
A Chinese-speaking hacker broke into the websites of more than 100 companies since September 25.
He barely touched a keyboard.
Here’s what happened.
A researcher at NorForge found exposed copies of Cairn, an open-source platform that lets you point a team of AI agents at a target and walk away.
The busiest operator typed instructions of fewer than 100 Chinese characters.
Translation: “find a way to run code on this site, then plant a back door.”
The agents tried more than 1,200 online shops in the US, Canada, Australia and Japan.
More than 100 of them fell, including Deere, SharkNinja and Cummins. 😳
Each break-in took about 23 hours, unsupervised.
The whole campaign burned roughly $5,000 in AI tokens.
That’s about $50 per hacked company.
A tractor maker’s website for the price of a nice dinner.
The setup appeared to be Anthropic’s Claude Code running DeepSeek’s cheapest model.
You can sign up for both this afternoon.
Here’s the part that unsettled the researcher.
The agents couldn’t crack one company’s main application.
So they went hunting for related infrastructure and found a linked control panel.
Then they tricked it into running their commands.
He’d assumed hacking agents would still need a human to say “try something else.”
They didn’t. 🤯
Welp.
Two weeks ago Anthropic said its own models wandered onto real websites.
Last week the banks locked AI agents out of your money.
This week someone pointed the same class of tool at ecommerce stores on purpose.
It worked 100 times.
The targets weren’t banks or governments.
They were online stores, which is a lot of the people reading this.
Picture a site running on a plugin nobody has updated since 2024.
An agent will find it, because it has 23 hours and nothing better to do. 😅
Somebody has to walk into a business and say “I ran the same agent against your site and here’s what it found.”
That somebody charges more than $50. 💰
Did You Know?
The first internet worm was released in 1988 by a 23-year-old Cornell grad student named Robert Morris.
It knocked out roughly 6,000 machines, about 10% of the internet at the time.
He became the first person convicted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
Today he’s a professor at MIT and a co-founder of Y Combinator. 😂
The 2026 version needed 100 characters and $5,000.
Nobody had to be a genius.
Blu Dot surpasses 2,000% ROAS with self-serve CTV ads
Home furniture brand Blu Dot blew up on CTV with help from Roku Ads Manager. Here’s how:
After a test campaign reached 211,000 households and achieved 1,010% ROAS, the brand went all in to promote its annual sales event. It removed age and income constraints to expand reach and shifted budget to custom audiences and retargeting, where intent was strongest.
The results speak for themselves. As Blu Dot increased their investment by 10x, ROAS jumped to 2,308% and more page-view conversions surpassed 50,000.
“For CTV campaigns, Roku has been a top performer,” said Claire Folkestad, Paid Media Strategist, Blu Dot. “Comping to our other platforms, we have seen really strong ROAS… and highly efficient CPMs, lower than any other CTV partner we've worked with.”
Using Roku Ads Manager, the campaign moved from a pilot to a permanent performance engine for the brand.
🗞️ The Tip AI News 🗞️
OpenAI wants $1.2 trillion and no IPO.
The FT reported today that OpenAI has been talking to large investors about a fresh raise that would value it at about $1.2 trillion, before any public listing.
Two details worth sitting with.
The talks were started by the investors, not OpenAI.
And on Saturday Sam Altman told Fortune the company will not go public in 2026, citing AI safety concerns. 👀
Here’s why that’s a strange pair.
OpenAI closed a $122 billion round in March at an $852 billion valuation.
Seven months later investors are offering to mark it up another $350 billion.
Meanwhile the CEO says he won’t let them cash out on the Nasdaq.
Anthropic, for contrast, walked investors through $16.8 billion in Q3 revenue last Wednesday.
It’s reportedly days from launching its roadshow.
So, the two labs are running opposite plays.
Anthropic opens the books and goes public.
OpenAI stays private, takes the cheque, and keeps the books closed. 😏
OpenAI declined to comment.
The FT says the figure could change.
😂Meme of the Day
Over to You...
Go check the last time anyone updated the plugins on your website.
If you have to think about it, the agent already knows the answer. 🔥
Founder, AI Persona Method | TheTip.ai
Get paid to solve problems like this → AI Certified Consultant
PS. I fly to Dallas tomorrow for AI Marketing World. If you’re there, find me. If you’re not, Thursday’s send is coming from a hotel room, so expect typos and at least one bad Texas pun. 🤠
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