By Brad Ferris · 24 October 2026
On Tuesday, iTnews carried a Reuters investigation headlined How one hacker used AI agents and a few thousand dollars to break into scores of sites. Drawing on research by Snorre Fagerland at NorForge, it describes a single Chinese-speaking attacker who, from 25 September, pointed AI agents at more than 1,200 ecommerce websites across the US, Canada, Australia and Japan. More than 100 companies were breached, including Deere, SharkNinja and Cummins. Fagerland estimates the whole campaign cost about US$5,000 in AI tokens, or roughly US$50 for each successful break-in. The instructions that set it running were fewer than 100 Chinese characters long.
That figure deserves a few minutes of attention from anyone who runs a mid-sized Australian business with a website, an online store or a customer portal. The reasoning is plain arithmetic, and the response is mostly housekeeping.
Most mid-market cyber planning rests on an unspoken judgement: a skilled attacker's time is expensive, so they spend it on banks, retailers with millions of card records and government agencies. A mid-sized distributor or manufacturer felt like a poor return on someone's week.
The Reuters account removes the week. According to the report, a typical successful intrusion took around 23 hours of automated probing, and nobody had to sit and watch it. When the agents found no weakness in one large company's main application, they went looking through public records for related infrastructure, found a public-facing control panel with a subtle flaw in how it handled data, and worked at it by trial and error until the server ran their commands.
Look at where the breaches landed. SharkNinja said the affected system was a standalone product-support site. Cummins said it was investigating a website run by a third-party vendor. These were the edges of each company's estate: the secondary sites, side systems and vendor-hosted pages that sit outside anyone's daily attention. Patient, low-cost automation is very good at finding the edges.
None of this means every business is about to be breached, and Reuters could not establish how much data was taken. The useful conclusion is narrower. If an attempt costs tens of dollars, being small no longer makes you uninteresting. It only makes you one more address on a long list.
On Wednesday the PHP Foundation shipped fixes for two remote-code-execution flaws across the PHP 8.x line. PHP is the language underneath WordPress, WooCommerce, Drupal and a long tail of custom web applications. As Simon Willison's summary of the Foundation's statement sets out, the coordinated disclosure went wrong: the vulnerability identifiers began circulating on forums a day early, a security firm briefly published a video of a working exploit, and the Foundation says that video sped up the development of proof-of-concept code. The release was brought forward a day in response.
The Australian Signals Directorate's alert, Critical vulnerabilities in PHP, says all PHP versions from PHP 5 onwards may be affected. At the time of writing ASD said it was not aware of successful exploitation in Australia. Its first recommendation is worth reading twice: organisations should identify PHP within their environments. Then patch, then monitor.
Put the two stories side by side and the order of operations is clear. A cheap, tireless attacker looks for whatever is exposed and unpatched. A critical patch is only useful if you know where it needs to go. The question that decides your exposure is how quickly you can answer "where do we run PHP?", and in most mid-sized businesses the honest answer is "we would need to ask the agency".
These are management questions. Your IT provider or web agency does the technical work; someone in the business needs to own the answers.
The tools that brought the cost of an attack down to about fifty dollars can be pointed at your own systems too, by people you have authorised. Automated scanning of your public footprint, plugin version checks and patch-status reporting have all become cheaper to run, and a decent provider can show you the results on a single page. Ask for that page.
The firms that come through the next year in good shape will be the ones that can produce a complete list of what they expose, with an owner and a patch time against each line, on the morning a new alert lands. Getting there takes a clear owner and a habit of keeping the list current, and it is well within reach of a mid-sized business.
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