This Week In Security: Bogus Ransom, WordPress Plugins, And KASLR

November 7, 2025 by 15 Comments

There’s another ransomware story this week, but this one comes with a special twist. If you’ve followed this column for long, you’re aware that ransomware has evolved beyond just encrypting files. Perhaps we owe a tiny bit of gratitude to ransomware gangs for convincing everyone that backups are important. The downside to companies getting their backups in order is that these criminals are turning to other means to extort payment from victims. Namely, exfiltrating files and releasing them to the public if the victim doesn’t pay up. And this is the situation in which the Akira ransomware actors claim to have Apache’s OpenOffice project.

There’s just one catch. Akira is threatening to release 23 GB of stolen documents, which include employee information — and the Apache Software Foundation says those documents don’t exist. OpenOffice hasn’t received a demand and can’t find any evidence of a breach. It seems likely that Akira has hit some company, but not part of the Apache Software Foundation. Possibly someone that heavily uses OpenOffice, or even provides some level of support for that application. There is one more wrinkle here.

Since Apache OpenOffice is an open source software project, none of our contributors are paid employees for the project or the foundation…

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Pi-Powered Camera Turns Heads And Lenses In Equal Measure

November 7, 2025 by 11 Comments

Have you ever seen photos of retro movie sets where the cameras seem to be bedazzled with lenses? Of course you can only film via one lens at a time, but mounting multiple lenses on a turret as was done in those days has certain advantages –particularly when working with tiny M12 lenses, like our own [Jenny List] recently did with this three-lens, Pi-zero based camera.

Given that it’s [Jenny], the hardware is truly open source, with not just the Python code to drive the Pi but the OpenSCAD code used to generate the STLs for the turret and the camera body all available via GitHub under a generous CC-BY-SA-4.0 license. Even using a cheap sensor and lenses from AliExpress, [Jenny] gets good results, as you can see from the demo video embedded below. (Jump to 1:20 if you just want to see images from the camera.)

The lenses are mounted to a 3D printed ring with detents to lock each quickly in place, held in place by a self-tapping screw, proving we at Hackaday practice what we preach. (Or that [Jenny] does, at least when it comes to fasteners.) Swapping lenses becomes a moment’s twist, as opposed to fiddling with tiny lenses hoping you don’t drop one. We imagine the same convenience is what drove turret cameras to be used in the movie industry, once upon a time.

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Guitar Picks made from recycled sheets

Artsy And Durable Recycling From A Heat Press

November 7, 2025 by 9 Comments

Plastic recycling is something that many of us strive to accomplish, but we often get caught up in the many hurdles along the way. [Brothers Make] are experienced in the world of plastic recycling and graced us with a look into a simple and reliable way to get consistent thin sheets of durable plastic. Using a common T-shirt press and a mixture of plastic scraps, you can get the process down quickly.

Summarizing the process is pretty easy due to its simplicity. You take a T-shirt press, put some Teflon baking sheets on both sides of some plastic scraps, and then press. Repeating this a couple of times with different colored plastic will get you a nice looking sheet of usable sheets for any purpose you could dream of. Thicker pieces can have some life changing applications, or as simple as guitar picks, as shown by [Brothers Make].

Make sure to try out this technique yourself if you have access to a press! Overuse of plastic is a widely known issue, and yet it feels like almost no one attempts to solve it. If you want a different kind of application, try making your own 3D printing filament out of recycled plastic!

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The Water-Cooled PS3 Sony Never Made

November 6, 2025 by 1 Comment

The Playstation 3 had a dizzying number of variants from its first launch in 2006 to when they stopped selling the slim models over a decade later in 2017. Of all those, you’ve probably never heard of the water-cooled Playstation 3 Pro, for the simple reason that it did not exist until [Zac] of Zac Builds created it in a video to push the limits of the now-vintage hardware.

This hack isn’t totally unique; you used to be able to buy watercooling kits for the PS3, but like the console itself, those have long since left the market. Of course [Zac] is hacking this Playstation 3 in 2025, so he’s doing it in a very modern way: with 3D scanning and CNC machining.

After very, very carefully removing the heat spreaders from the CPU and GPU to replace the dried out thermal paste, [Zac] scans the main board to design mounts for the dual waterblocks. Those mounts are, of course, 3D printed in carbon fibre reinforced nylon. Since the mount is going to be under pressure and rather warm, he anneals the nylon for 24 hours at 85 degrees. 3D printing also comes into play mount the pump and radiator into a handsome case that nearly looks like something Sony could have put out back in the day. That whole workflow seems normal today, but would have been borderline science-fiction with the console was new. .

Note that this is not a 2007 unit. [Zac] picked the newest PS3 he could that was still hackable–each revision got more efficient as the chips moved to smaller architectures, but Sony did eventually lock down the firmware to prevent overclocking. Which is of course the point here: since the stock hardware leaves a lot on the table in terms of thermal management, [Zac] figured there would be great performance boosts available.

As it happens, [Zac] was right about performance boosts– on GPU limited titles, he’s getting upto 50% higher frame rates. (Which makes sense, given he’s overclocking the GPU by about 50%.) Loading times are also much improved with the inevitable HDD to SSD swap.

The last time we featured a watercooled playstation hack was back in 2011, for a PS3 laptop of all things. The modern workflow makes it much easier. It’s been a few years since we last posted a Playstation 3 hack. Perhaps now, as they age into becoming “retro” we’ll see a revival in that category.

Thanks to [Stephen Walters] for the tip, via Yanko Design, which seems to provide an LLM-assisted (or generated) summary of [Zac]’s video.

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ABCCAD Is Voxels Meets LEGO In AR

November 6, 2025 by 4 Comments

We get it, CAD software can be daunting to learn. Somehow [Boaztheostrich] found it so daunting he procrastinated his way into a AR voxel-based CAD app he calls “ABCCAD”, written in Godot for the Meta Quest 3.

The app is simplicity itself: pressing A or X on the controller spawns a cube, which you can place wherever you like in virtual space by moving the controller in real space. The trigger then saves the cube position. Grabbing a cube uses the controller’s grab buttons. You can even change colors (with B or Y), but like in OpenSCAD it appears that’s not actually going to have any effect on the exported STL. Check it out in action in the demo video embedded below.

As far as CAD applications go, this is as simplistic as it gets, but there’s a certain charm to its simplicity. It’s almost like virtual LEGO. Besides, TinkerCAD wasn’t much more complicated when it started out, and look at it now.

Sure, one could say if [Boaz] wanted to do CAD he’d have been better off putting the time into learning good old OpenSCAD or FreeCAD (which can now get you SolidWorks certs, apparently), but this is a fun little app that let him stretch his chops in Godot, another great open-source tool. ABCCAD is, itself, open-source under an MIT license.

We seem to have a paucity of posts under the Godot tag, so if you’ve got a hack that uses the open-source game engine, please send us a tip.

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I/V plot at various voltage levels

2025 Component Abuse Challenge: Reverse Biasing An NPN BJT

November 6, 2025 by 9 Comments

For the Component Abuse Challenge our hacker [Tim Williams] observes that N-P-N reads the same way forwards and backwards, so… what happens if we reverse bias one? (Note: this remark about N-P-N reading the same forward and backward is a lighthearted joke; in fact the level of doping in the emitter and collector is different so those Ns are not fungible and will exhibit different properties and have different characteristics.)

What happens if we reverse bias an NPN transistor?In the margin you can see how the question was originally posed by Bob Pease back in March 18, 1996.

In his article [Tim] mentions that some transistors are specifically designed to operate when reverse biased, which [Tim] calls “inverted mode”, whereas most transistors are not designed to work in this fashion and that’s the sort of abuse that could damage the component and lead it to malfunction.

But what is Vout? [Tim] reports that he measured approximately -0.4 volts using his high-impedance meter. We tried this experiment in the lab ourselves but we were not able to duplicate [Tim]’s result; however there is a long list of potential reasons for such an outcome. If you do this experiment yourself we would love to hear about your results in the comments section!

If you’re still learning about transistors you might like to check out our five part series on transistors as amplifiers, starting here: Won’t Somebody, Please, Think Of The Transistors!

Thanks to [Tim] for his submission, we wish him the best of luck in the competition!

2025 Hackaday Component Abuse Challenge

Making Steam-Powered LEGO Machines

November 6, 2025 by 6 Comments

Over the decades we have seen a lot of methods for powering LEGO-based contraptions, ranging from LEGO Technic pneumatics to electric motors, but what about steam power? We have all seen those cute little model steam engines that can definitely put out some power. Sure, you can just drop those in like a kind of confused internal combustion engine, or you can try to make a steam engine that actually tries to be directly compatible with LEGO.

While exploring this topic, [Jamie’s Brick Jams] on YouTube found that the primary concern here is simply the very hot steam produced by the boiler. While not a surprise to anyone who has ever run a model steam engine, this poses a major challenge to the thermoplastics used by LEGO.

Obviously a boiler cannot be made out of plastic, but the steam turbine can. That said, material selection here is key, as the hot, wet steam produced by the boiler demolishes PLA parts and ruined the original and very unsafe copper boiler in the process. Ultimately a LEGO Technic-compatible steam turbine was printed in high temperature resistant PAHT-CF and PC filament, which enables a steam-powered LEGO walker to come to life, albeit with a distinct lack of power.

Model steam engine enthusiasts are of course quick to point out that you should try to create dry steam through superheating, definitely add a safety valve and so on, all of which should make for an even more powerful and safe LEGO steam engine. For a rundown of how steam engines work, [Lawrie] did an excellent video on the basics a while back, as well as a video playlist full of demonstrations of both classical Mamod model engines and questionable modern takes.

Suffice it to say that although model steam engines look like toys, they involve fire, hot steam and other fascinating ways to melt things, light them on fire and cause painful injuries, so definitely follow a safety briefing before attempting any of it at home.

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