One operator ran 105 AI-driven attack waves in five days at about $25 a company

Each tool had one job. Strix handled discovery, running 146 times against 138 hosts between August 23 and 31 and accumulating 633 scanning hours ^[8]. Cairn took objectives such as obtaining a shell or admin access and worked them autonomously ^[6]. Hermes ran the campaign: orchestration, tactical decisions, post-exploitation, directed by claude-opus-4.6 ^[7]. Its skill library held 121 entries, 78 of them attack-related, under a persona called "SOUL - Red Team Operator" ^[9].

Those 633 hours sit inside a nine-day window containing 216 hours of wall clock, so Strix averaged close to three scans running at once, continuously ^[1].

Gambit says the operator fed the Strix output through a website traffic-ranking service and prioritized companies running custom software, on the assumption that custom code was likelier to be vulnerable ^[15]. Skimmer delivery then varied with whatever access Cairn won: code appended to legitimate JavaScript files, script tags added to checkout pages and Google tag blocks, poisoned S3/CDN content and server-side caches, modified database fields, altered Kubernetes deployments ^[12].

The card theft was concentrated. Two companies produced the entire haul, and five other organizations had skimmers planted on their sites to collect payment data ^[4].

One Hermes skill file carries the cleanup step: "After extracting and downloading all card data, wipe the source fields in batches" ^[17]. The researchers found that instruction pointed at Magento databases after exfiltration ^[16], and say the data loss caused operational disruptions at several retailers ^[18]. Their advice to defenders is to plan for losing their own records as a side effect of the attacker's housekeeping ^[24].

On spend, Gambit wrote: "The operator's own cost review gives a similar figure, a mean of $25.46 over 101 completed scans, from $3.13 for the cheapest target to $79.31 for the most expensive" ^[22]. Divide the top of the researchers' total estimate by the card count and each stolen record cost about three cents in inference ^[3].

The 27 companies that fell came out of 105 distinct waves, so roughly one in four attempts landed to some degree ^[11][2]. Gambit also says access was often obtained within a few hours, with the operator supplying short instructions between autonomous runs ^[23].

The evidence comes from inside the operation: Gambit researchers gained access to the attacker's staging server and retrieved direct evidence ^[13]. All of it is one startup's investigation, and the account describes the human operator only as appearing to be Chinese, briefing the agents on goals and leaving them to it ^[10].