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The trick: Headline Over Filing

One hacker, 100+ companies, $50 each.

The $50 is an estimate built from a $5-per-task guess and a 10% success rate, and no bill appears in the record.

Issue 5424 October 202615 receipts3 min
A detective inspects a robot's pencil-drawn price tag and finds a blank receipt.
AI illustration

one attacker's AI agents compromised 100+ companies at $50 each.

Before you read on. Your call?

NorForge's report gives about $5 per task and a roughly 10% success rate, with 'considerable' uncertainty and no real token numbers. The 100+ count comes from Reuters and is not independently verified by The Next Web.

$5NorForge's estimated average cost per task
~10%NorForge's rough average success rate
1,200+Sites attempted

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The trick has a name

We call it Headline Over Filing: the document underneath says something else. You'll see it again. Learn to spot it →

Say this in tomorrow's meeting“The $50 is NorForge's $5-per-task guess divided by a 10% success rate. It is an estimate, and no bill appears in the record.”

Receipts

  1. Supports aiweekly.co: counted more than 100 breached corporate sites against 1,200+ attempted, at roughly $50 of tokens per successful hack.
  2. Supports aiweekly.co: From there the agents worked unsupervised.
  3. Context thenextweb.com: about $5,000 worth of tokens, or roughly $50 per successful hack. That is a rough estimate.
  4. Context thenextweb.com: had tried to break into more than 1,200 sites, according to Reuters.
  5. Refutes thenextweb.com: TNW has not independently verified the intrusions.
  6. Context thenextweb.com: Reuters could not establish how much data, if any, the hackers took.
  7. Context thenextweb.com: Deere told Reuters it had taken remediation steps and had no sign that anyone accessed sensitive information.
  8. Supports thenextweb.com: Fagerland told Reuters he had assumed hacking agents would still need at least some supervision.
  9. Refutes norforge.com: We dont have actual numbers on token usage
  10. Refutes norforge.com: We estimate the average cost of a task to end up around $5 if one includes unsuccessful, early ending projects.
  11. Context norforge.com: average success rate is hovering around 10%, with many of the remaining tasks achieving partial goals
  12. Refutes norforge.com: The uncertainty here is however considerable, and numbers could be off by a clear margin.
  13. Context norforge.com: A human operator can also add their own hints to the same blackboard.
  14. Supports norforge.com: The URL did indeed serve an uploader webshell.
  15. Supports norforge.com: Even so, there's no doubt that this is relatively cheap.

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This story is a stable, citable object. If you can falsify a verdict,tell us. Corrections are loud here.