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Hackaday Links: October 5, 2025

October 5, 2025 by 15 Comments

What the Flock? It’s probably just some quirk of The Almighty Algorithm, but ever since we featured a story on Flock’s crime-fighting drones last week, we’ve been flooded with other stories about the company, some of which aren’t very flattering. The first thing that we were pushed was this handy interactive map of the company’s network of automatic license plate readers. We had no idea how extensive the network was, and while our location is relatively free from these devices, at least ones operated on behalf of state, county, or local law enforcement, we did learn to our dismay that our local Lowe’s saw fit to install three of these cameras on the entrances to their parking lot. Not wishing to have our coming and goings documented, we’ll be taking our home improvement dollars elsewhere for now.

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The Inside Story Of The UK’s Great CB Petrol Scam

September 19, 2025 by 28 Comments

Looking at gasoline prices today, it’s hard to believe that there was a time when 75 cents a gallon seemed outrageous. But that’s the way it was in the 70s, and when it tripped over a dollar, things got pretty dicey. Fuel theft was rampant, both from car fuel tanks — remember lockable gas caps? — and even from gas stations, where drive-offs became common, and unscrupulous employees found ways to trick the system into dispensing free gas.

But one method of fuel theft that escaped our attention was the use of CB radios to spoof petrol pumps, which [Ringway Manchester] details in his new video. The scam happened in the early 80s, only a few years after CB became legal in the UK but quite a while since illegal use had exploded. The trick involved a CB transceiver equipped with a so-called “burner,” a high-power and highly illegal linear amplifier used to boost the radiated power of the signal. When keyed up in the vicinity of dispensers with digital controls, the dispensing rate on the display would appear to slow down markedly, while the pump itself stayed at the same speed. The result was more fuel dispensed than the amount reported to the cashier.

If this sounds apocryphal, [Ringway] assures us that it wasn’t. When the spoofing was reported, authorities up to and including Scotland Yard investigated and found that it was indeed plausible. The problem appeared to be the powerful RF signal interfering with the pulses from the flowmeter on the dispenser. The UK had both 27 MHz and 934 MHz CB at the time; [Ringway] isn’t clear which CB band was used for the exploit, but we’d guess it was the former, in which case we can see how the signals would interfere. Another thing to keep in mind is that CB radios in the UK were FM, as opposed to AM and SSB in the United States. So we wonder if the same trick would have worked here.

At the end of the day, no matter how clever you are about it, theft is theft, and things probably aren’t going to go well for you if you try to pull this off today. Besides, it’s not likely that pumps haven’t been hardened against these sorts of attacks. Still, if you want a look inside a modern pump to see if you can find any weaknesses, have at it. Just don’t tell them where you heard about it.

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Hackaday Links: December 22, 2024

December 22, 2024 by 11 Comments

Early Monday morning, while many of us will be putting the finishing touches — or just beginning, ahem — on our Christmas preparations, solar scientists will hold their collective breath as they wait for word from the Parker Solar Probe’s record-setting passage through the sun’s atmosphere. The probe, which has been in a highly elliptical solar orbit since its 2018 launch, has been getting occasional gravitational nudges by close encounters with Venus. This has moved the perihelion ever closer to the sun’s surface, and on Monday morning it will make its closest approach yet, a mere 6.1 million kilometers from the roiling photosphere. That will put it inside the corona, the sun’s extremely energetic atmosphere, which we normally only see during total eclipses. Traveling at almost 700,000 kilometers per hour, it won’t be there very long, and it’ll be doing everything it needs to do autonomously since the high-energy plasma of the corona and the eight-light-minute distance makes remote control impossible. It’ll be a few days before communications are re-established and the data downloaded, which will make a nice present for the solar science community to unwrap.

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A Potential Exploit With The Ext Filesystem

December 10, 2024 by 58 Comments

The extended filesystem, otherwise known as ext, has been a fundamental part of Linux since before the 1.0 release in 1994. Currently the filesystem is on its fourth major revision, in use since its release in 2008 thanks to its stability, reliability, and backwards compatibility with the other ext filesystem versions. But with that much history there are bound to be a few issues cropping up here and there. [Will] recently found an exploit with this filesystem that can cause a Linux kernel to immediately panic when a manipulated USB drive is inserted into a computer.

[Will] discovered this quirk when investigating the intricacies of the filesystem for problems and other vulnerabilities. A tool called tune2fs, used for administering and modifying ext filesystems, includes the ability to pass certain commands to the Linux kernel when certain situations arise with the filesystem itself, including that the kernel should panic. One situation is that the ext filesystem itself becomes corrupted, which can then cause the kernel panic. Armed with this knowledge, a USB drive can be purposefully given a corrupted ext filesystem which, when plugged into a Linux machine, can cause the computer to shut down.

The post linked above goes into some discussion about how this exploit could be used maliciously to gain access to a Linux system, including rebooting computers where no access to a power button is otherwise enabled or making other changes to the system before needing a reboot to apply the changes. In general, though, it’s good to assume an attacker could take any route to gain access to a machine. This exploit from a few years ago, for example, allowed another Linux tool to be used to gain root access.

Thanks to [Timothy] for the tip!

Kickflips And Buffer Slips: An Exploit In Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater

August 8, 2024 by 7 Comments

[Ryan Miceli] wanted to build some reverse engineering skills by finding a new exploit for an original Xbox. Where he ended up was an exploit that worked across the network, across several games, and several different consoles. But it all started with an unbounded strcpy in Tony Hawk Pro Skater (THPS).

Xbox, PlayStation 2, and Gamecube (often referred to as the sixth generation) are wonderful hacking targets as they don’t possess many of the security enhancements of the seventh generation, like hypervisors, privilege levels, and hardware executability protections. The console launches the game, and control is fully within the game, so once you get your code executing, you’re done. The exploit started with a feature in many Tony Hawk games, the custom map editor. In the editor, you can create gaps between jumps with a name so that when a player completes the gap, it can flash “you jumped x” in big letters. However, on Xbox, the gap name is copied with an unbounded strcpy to the stack, meaning you can overwrite the return pointer. Additionally, there are no stack cookies for THPS, which meant nothing stopped [Ryan] from smashing his way through. He includes a small memcpy stub in the header of the level, which the gap name jumps to, which then copies and executes his full payload.

The other games in the series, like Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 (THPS3), had the bug, but the gap name was copied to the heap, not the stack. However, he could overflow into a vtable of the next object that would call his code when the object was freed. However, the level save data wasn’t an executable region of memory, which meant he needed ROP (return-oriented programming). Just a few gadgets later, and [Ryan] had another exploit working.

Tony Hawk’s Underground 1 and 2 had stack cookies turned on. This meant a random value was placed on the stack before a function, then popped off and checked. This meant the program could check if its stack had been smashed. Unfortunately for [Ryan], this proved to be a major roadblock. However, the PC and PS2 versions of these games do not have stack cookies, which means they can be exploited in the same manner.

The beauty of the exploit is that the game allows you to invite a friend to play a custom level. This means once the level is transferred over the network, their console is hacked as well. However, the full payload wasn’t sent to the client console, which meant the exploit had to send the payload to the other console using the game’s existing net code. The exploit sets up an asynchronous file transfer then hands control back to the game. Of course, there was a memory leak in the netcode, because the game had never sent large amounts of data over the network before. So, part of the exploit was a hot patch for a memory leak.

As a last hurrah, [Ryan] ported the hack to Gamecube, PS2, and PC. The code is on GitHub, and the video is after the break. We love the attention the Xbox has been getting, and if you’re curious about a hardware hack, this 256MB ROM mod goes deep into the internals.

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Hackaday Links: August 20, 2023

August 20, 2023 by 14 Comments

In some ways, we’ve become a little jaded when it comes to news from Mars, which almost always has to do with the Ingenuity helicopter completing yet another successful flight. And so it was with the report of flight number 54 — almost. It turns out that the previous flight, which was conducted on July 22, suffered a glitch that cut the flight short by forcing an immediate landing. We had either completely missed that in the news, or NASA wasn’t forthcoming with the news, perhaps until they knew more. But the details of the error are interesting and appear related to a glitch that happened 46 flights before, way back in May of 2021, that involves dropped frames from the video coming from the helicopter’s down-facing navigational camera. When this first cropped up back on flight six, it was only a couple of missed frames that nearly crashed the craft, thanks to confusion between the video stream and the inertial data. Flight engineers updated the aircraft’s software to allow for a little more flexibility with dropped frames, which worked perfectly up until the aborted flight 53.

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Remote Code Execution On An Oscilloscope

July 17, 2023 by 10 Comments

There are a huge number of products available in the modern world that come with network connectivity now, when perhaps they might be better off with out it. Kitchen appliances like refrigerators are the classic example, but things like lightbulbs, toys, thermostats, and door locks can all be found with some sort of Internet connectivity. Perhaps for the worse, too, if the security of these devices isn’t taken seriously, as they can all be vectors for attacks. Even things like this Rigol oscilloscope and its companion web app can be targets.

The vulnerability for this oscilloscope starts with an analysis of the firmware, which includes the web control application. To prevent potentially bricking a real oscilloscope, this firmware was emulated using QEMU. The vulnerability exists in the part of the code which involves changing the password, where an attacker can bypass authentication by injecting commands into the password fields. In the end, the only thing that needs to be done to gain arbitrary code execution on the oscilloscope is to issue a curl command directed at the oscilloscope.

In the end, [Maunel] suggests not connecting this oscilloscope to the Internet at all. He has informed the producer about it but as of this writing there has not been a resolution. It does, however, demonstrate the vulnerabilities that can be present in network-connected devices where the developers of the software haven’t gone to the lengths required to properly secure them for use with the modern Internet. Even things not connected to a traditional Internet connection can be targets for attacks.