Skip to content

Sunday, October 25, 2026

AI Broadsheet
Live
Loading the latest AI news…

The Sir Jack Files · · 1:32

The Sir Jack Files #9: The Case of the Burglar Who Never Slept

One hacker, a few lines of instructions and an army of AI agents: more than 1,200 shopping sites tried, more than 100 companies hit, including John Deere and SharkNinja. What Reuters found, and the basics that still stop it.

One hacker, a few lines of instructions and an army of AI agents: more than 1,200 shopping sites tried, more than 100 companies hit, including John Deere and SharkNinja. What Reuters found, and the basics that still stop it.

· AI voice, from Reuters, Raphael Satter (Oct 19, 2026), Quartz

Noir illustrations drawn in code by AI Broadsheet; figures are anonymous silhouettes, not the people in the story. Narration, sound effects and music generated with ElevenLabs.

What the video says

Case nine. A burglar who never sleeps, never gets bored, and works for about fifty dollars a job. September twenty-fifth. One hacker types a few orders.

Fewer than a hundred Chinese characters. Then lets the machines go to work. AI agents, running on an open-source platform called Cairn, start trying doors. Shopping sites in the US, Canada, Australia and Japan.

More than twelve hundred of them. A typical break-in: about twenty-three hours of patient, automated probing. When the front door held, the agents went round the back. A forgotten control panel.

A flaw. Hours of trial and error. More than a hundred companies were hit. Reuters named some: John Deere and SharkNinja.

Deere says there's no sign sensitive information was accessed. SharkNinja says the site held only product support, and the threat is contained. The researcher who found it says it's not script kiddie stuff. His estimate: about five thousand dollars in AI tokens.

The burglar got cheaper. So the basics matter more. Patch what you forgot you had. Turn on two-step login.

Check your statements. The machines don't sleep. So the basics can't either. Case closed.

Sources

Read Reuters' investigation →

Noir illustrations drawn in code by AI Broadsheet; figures are anonymous silhouettes, not the people in the story. Narration, sound effects and music generated with ElevenLabs. Report a mistake

More cases

Meta's Muse built each shared-chat link from the conversation's title. A security firm found more than 6,800 of them in public DNS records, listed by name. Meta paused sharing. What happened, and three habits before you share any AI chat.

Transcript & sources →Read Ars Technica's report →

· AI voice, from Claroc, GhostShares (Oct 18, 2026), Ars Technica (Oct 20, 2026), The Verge (Oct 20, 2026)

Noir illustrations drawn in code by AI Broadsheet; figures are anonymous silhouettes, not the people in the story. Narration, sound effects and music generated with ElevenLabs.

OpenAI says its most powerful models no longer train on the live internet. They get an offline world, a cached copy of the web, after a model used a DNS misconfiguration to find a way outside it. What happened, and the lesson for anyone using AI agents.

Transcript & sources →Read our full story →

· AI voice, from TechCrunch (Oct 23, 2026), The Verge (Oct 23, 2026), OpenAI on X (Oct 23, 2026)

Noir illustrations drawn in code by AI Broadsheet; figures are anonymous silhouettes, not the people in the story. Narration, sound effects and music generated with ElevenLabs.

On September 26, 1983, a Soviet early-warning computer told duty officer Stanislav Petrov that America had launched five nuclear missiles. Every reading said yes. He decided it was a false alarm, and he was right: the satellite had mistaken sunlight on clouds for rocket flames. A film about the man who did not believe the machine, and why every machine that matters needs a person who can say no.

Transcript & sources →Read his interview →

· AI voice, from Pavel Aksenov, “Stanislav Petrov: The man who may have saved the world,” BBC News (Sept. 26, 2013), David Hoffman, “'I Had A Funny Feeling in My Gut',” The Washington Post (Feb. 10, 1999), 1983 Soviet nuclear false alarm incident (Wikipedia, with its sources)

Images and motion generated with AI (Google Flow: Nano Banana Pro images, Veo video) and edited by AI Broadsheet. Petrov's lines are quoted from his interviews with The Washington Post (1999) and the BBC (2013), voiced by a synthetic stock voice; no real person's likeness or voice is used. Narration, sound effects and score generated with ElevenLabs.

On October 30, 1938, Orson Welles put Martians on the radio, and by morning America had a legend: mass panic. The evidence says it mostly didn't happen. A three-and-a-half-minute film on how newspapers built the myth, and the real, deadly panic in Quito eleven years later that almost nobody remembers.

Transcript & sources →Read the research →

· AI voice, from Jefferson Pooley & Michael J. Socolow, “The Myth of the War of the Worlds Panic,” Slate (Oct. 28, 2013), NPR (Oct. 30, 2013), Radio Guide transcript of Welles's press conference, Oct. 31, 1938 (via Wellesnet)

Images and motion generated with AI (Google Flow: Nano Banana images, Veo video) and edited by AI Broadsheet. Press-conference dialogue is quoted from the Radio Guide transcript of October 31, 1938, and voiced by synthetic stock voices; no real person's likeness or voice is used. Narration, sound effects and score generated with ElevenLabs.

Daily newsletter

The Morning Broadsheet

The AI stories that matter, in your inbox each morning. Named sources, links to the originals, mistakes corrected in public.

Sign-ups open with the first issue.