The AI-agent heist that cost $25 a company

Card skimming used to be a craft. You needed a crew, time, and a foothold in the target's stack, and the economics only worked if the mark was worth the intrusion. Gambit Security, a cybersecurity startup, documented a campaign that's been running since at least July and is still active as of September 22, in which a single, apparently Chinese-speaking operator chained three off-the-shelf AI agent tools — Strix to scan for vulns, Cairn to exploit them and grab a shell, and Hermes to orchestrate the whole thing on top of claude-opus-4.6 — and walked through hundreds of online retailers. In a five-day burst alone, at least 27 companies got compromised and more than 100 attack waves went out. The haul: over 600,000 valid card records from two targets, plus skimmer malware planted on a further five sites. That's a classic Magecart, except the skimmer now writes its own code and picks its own targets.

The number that actually matters isn't the 600K cards; it's the price tag. The attacker's OpenRouter account shows roughly $7,000 burned over a few weeks, and Gambit estimates the full campaign at $12,000 to $18,000 — a mean of about $25 per target, with the cheapest hit at $3.13 and the most expensive at $79.31. Access typically landed in a few hours, the human handing the agent a short objective and letting it work between autonomous runs. The most interesting detail is the cleanup. The operator told the agent to "wipe the source fields in batches" after exfiltrating card data from the Magento databases. The intent was to scrub the evidence; the side effect was real data loss and operational disruption at several retailers, collateral damage the attacker almost certainly didn't care about. Automation that doesn't respect your actual systems isn't just a threat vector — it's a data-destruction path that runs as a side effect of the heist itself.

Eyal Sela
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What this changes for the rest of us is the cost line in the risk equation. The attacker isn't picking targets at random; it's ranking them by web traffic and, more pointedly, by what looks like custom software — the shops most likely to have something to exploit. The skimmer landed by every means the access allowed: appending to legitimate JavaScript, dropping script tags into checkout pages, poisoning S3 and CDN caches, modifying database fields, altering Kubernetes deployments, and using cron jobs to re-deploy itself after someone removed it. So the durable defense against a $25-a-company attack isn't the shiniest new scanner — it's accepting that the attacker's marginal cost is now lower than your detection budget, and making it more annoying to re-infect a checkout than to find it. But here's the part I keep coming back to: when your intruder is an agent instructed to delete its own traces, what does incident response even look like once the forensic trail is gone?

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