supply chain

25 Articles

This Week In Security: Another Record Patch Tuesday, LAME Is More Secure, Secure Boot Is Less Secure, And Milk Malware

July 17, 2026 by 18 Comments

Following the reports last week using the Windows Global Device ID (GDID) in tracking a malware operators behavior, here is a comprehensive write-up about what goes into the GDID and how it is used. It’s worth noting that the GDID itself was not used to catch the malware operator, however once a suspect was identified, the GDID was used to correlate behavior across various Microsoft products on the Internet.

The GDID is generated and assigned during a Windows install, but a re-install of Windows will generate a new GDID. Developer [SmtimesIWndr] tracks the generation and tracking of the GDID through the various Windows libraries and services, identifying where it appears to be created and how it is passed to other services like Azure.

Worth noting is your GDID is a unique, personally identifiable piece of information; if you go exploring and extract it from your Windows install, be sure to keep it private!

LAME mp3 updates

Those of us who were around for the dawn of MP3 files may remember the LAME encoder and library. After almost 10 years, there is a new LAME release.

Notably, this includes two security fixes, one for a stack buffer overflow based on malicious input to the Blade encoder, and an integer underflow in the AIFF header parser. Both of the fixed bugs feel very old-school, which seems appropriate given the age of the library and most of the related code.

Buffer overflows impacting the stack are some of the simplest and most direct forms of vulnerabilities, where it is possible to write past the end of a buffer and control how the function returns and instead execute arbitrary code. Integer under-flows, similarly, impact memory management; usually caused by allowing a variable that stores the size of a buffer to go negative. Since sizes are typically unsigned positive numbers, a negative is interpreted as an enormous positive number, writing past the proper buffer length.

Despite the new findings, the LAME codebase has been extremely resilient over the years, and considering the number of programs that likely still use LAME under the covers to process audio, seeing the project wake up with security fixes is great news.

Recovering Passwords from BIOS

Researchers have found a vulnerability in Dell BIOS code that allows extraction of the administrator password from the BIOS flash chips, either with physical access via a flash programmer, or via administrator or root level access to the operating system and reading the contents of the flash chip.

Dell used a 20 byte key to encrypt a 32 byte password field: for any admin password of 12 characters or fewer, the password is stored in completely plaintext. For longer passwords, characters beyond the first 12 are encrypted – but the random bytes are computed from the first character of the password mixed with fixed device data, yielding only 256 possible encryption seeds for the remaining bytes.

Using the BIOS admin password for evil requires local access, so the attack surface is small, however as the researchers note it controls the boot order and may allow an attacker with physical access to then boot an unsigned OS or bypass full-disk encryption, so it’s serious.

Continue reading “This Week In Security: Another Record Patch Tuesday, LAME Is More Secure, Secure Boot Is Less Secure, And Milk Malware” →

This Week In Security: Escaping Linux VMs, Vulnerable Solar, Confusing AI (Again), And Confusing NPM Malware

July 10, 2026 by 8 Comments

The Januscape vulnerability allows a user in a guest VM managed by the Linux Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM) to corrupt memory in the host system and break out of isolation.

KVM virtualization is used by major hosting platforms like Amazon AWS, Google GCP, Digital Ocean, and many more. All of the shared hosting platforms count on virtualization to isolate untrusted guest systems from the physical hardware and each other; being able to corrupt memory for all guests or break isolation presents a major threat.

The bug report says the error has been present for 16 years, which is nearly the entire lifetime of the KVM subsystem in Linux. Fixes are available in mainline, and major hosting providers who count on KVM are likely already updating.

Vulnerabilities In Balcony Solar

Micro solar, or “balcony solar”, installs have been gaining traction in Europe as a way to offset rising electrical costs by connecting solar and battery systems to a house or apartment power system.

Vulnerabilities have been found in the popular Hoymiles micro-inverter, which uses a proprietary RF radio protocol to manage the devices. Unfortunately, it looks like this protocol has no encryption or authentication beyond validating the serial number, and the serial number is also available over a wireless probe command.

Armed with a Nordic nRF radio researchers were able to discover nearby inverters in the wild and collect the serial numbers, though of course they stopped short of issuing commands to random users.

The wireless management control allows controlling the device power and output levels, as well as setting a lockout PIN, which the researchers suspect could be used to disable devices and lock the legitimate owners out completely.

There are an estimated 500,000 units in use, and currently the only known mitigation is to unplug the device entirely and disconnect the solar panels, though the team suggests that setting an anti-theft PIN may also help – or at least prevent an unknown PIN being set.

Be sure to check out the link for an in-depth analysis of the protocol and the surprising lack of protection.

Continue reading “This Week In Security: Escaping Linux VMs, Vulnerable Solar, Confusing AI (Again), And Confusing NPM Malware” →

This Week In Security: The Supply Chain Has Problems

April 3, 2026 by 7 Comments

The biggest story of the week is a new massive supply chain breach, which appears to be unrelated to the previous massive supply chain breaches, this time of the Axios HTTP project.

Axios was created as a more developer-friendly Javascript HTTP interface for node.js, giving a promise-based API instead of the basic callback API. (Promise-based programming allows for simpler coding workflows, where a program can wait for a promise to be fulfilled, instead of the developer having to manage the state of every request manually.) Javascript has since provided a modern Fetch API that provides similar functionality, but Axios remains one of the most popular packages on the node.js NPM repository, with 100 million weekly downloads.

The lead developer of Axios believes he was compromised by a collaboration request – a common tactic for phishing specific targets: a project for an IDE like VS Code can include code that executes on the developers system when the project is run. Even outside a traditional IDE, common development tools like configure scripts and makefiles can easily run commands.

Socket.dev breaks down the attack in detail. Once the attackers had credentials to publish to the Axios NPM, they inserted malware as a new dependency to Axios, instead of modifying Axios itself. This likely helped the attack bypass other security checkers. The dependency – plain-crypto-js – is itself simply a copy of a popular encryption utility library, but one which executes additional code during the post-installation process available to all NPM packages. Continue reading “This Week In Security: The Supply Chain Has Problems” →

This Week In Security: Second Verse, Worse Than The First

March 27, 2026 by 16 Comments

Isn’t there some claim events come in threes? After the extremely rare leak of the iOS Coruna exploit chain recently, now we have details from Google on a second significant exploit in the wild, dubbed Darksword.

Like Coruna, Darksword appears to have followed the path of government security contractors, to different government actors, to crypto stealer. It appears to focus on exploits already fixed in modern iOS releases, with most affecting iOS 18 and all patched by iOS 26.3.

Going from almost no public examples of modern iOS exploits to two in as many weeks is wild, so if mobile device security is of interest, be sure to check out the Google write-up.

Another FBI Router Warning

The second too early to be retro – but too important to ignore – repeat security item is a second alert by the FBI cautioning about end-of-life consumer network hardware under active exploitation, with the FBI tracking almost 400,000 device infections so far.

Like the warning two weeks ago, the FBI calls out a handful of consumer routers – but this time they’re devices that may actually still be service in some of our homes (or our less cutting edge friends and family), calling out devices from Netgear, TP-Link, D-Link, and Zyxel:

  • Netgear DGN2200v4 and AC1900 R700
  • TP-Link Archer C20, TL-WR840N, TL-WR849N, and WR841N
  • D-Link DIR-818LW, 850L, and 860L
  • Zyxel EMG6726-B10A, VMG1312-B10D, VMG1312-T20B, VMG3925-B10A, VMG3925-B10C, VMG4825-B10A, VMG4927-B50A, VMG8825-T50K

While many of these devices are over ten years old, they still support modern networking – some of them even supporting 802.11ac (also called Wi-Fi 5).  Unfortunately, since support has been ended by the manufacturers, publicly disclosed vulnerabilities have not been patched (and now never will be, officially) Continue reading “This Week In Security: Second Verse, Worse Than The First” →

I, Integrated Circuit

February 4, 2026 by 80 Comments

In 1958, the American free-market economist Leonard E Read published his famous essay I, Pencil, in which he made his point about the interconnected nature of free market economics by following everything, and we mean Everything, that went into the manufacture of the humble writing instrument.

I thought about the essay last week when I wrote a piece about a new Chinese microcontroller with an integrated driver for small motors, because a commenter asked me why I was featuring a non-American part. As a Brit I remarked that it would look a bit silly were I were to only feature parts made in dear old Blighty — yes, we do still make some semiconductors! — and it made more sense to feature cool parts wherever I found them. But it left me musing about the nature of semiconductors, and whether it’s possible for any of them to truly only come from one country. So here follows a much more functional I, Chip than Read’s original, trying to work out just where your integrated circuit really comes from. It almost certainly takes great liberties with the details of the processes involved, but the countries of manufacture and extraction are accurate. Continue reading “I, Integrated Circuit” →

A Field Guide To The North American Cold Chain

July 17, 2025 by 22 Comments

So far in the “Field Guide” series, we’ve mainly looked at critical infrastructure systems that, while often blending into the scenery, are easily observable once you know where to look. From the substations, transmission lines, and local distribution systems that make up the electrical grid to cell towers and even weigh stations, most of what we’ve covered so far are mega-scale engineering projects that are critical to modern life, each of which you can get a good look at while you’re tooling down the road in a car.

This time around, though, we’re going to switch things up a bit and discuss a less-obvious but vitally important infrastructure system: the cold chain. While you might never have heard the term, you’ve certainly seen most of the major components at one time or another, and if you’ve ever enjoyed fresh fruit in the dead of winter or microwaved a frozen burrito for dinner, you’ve taken advantage of a globe-spanning system that makes sure environmentally sensitive products can be safely stored and transported.

Continue reading “A Field Guide To The North American Cold Chain” →

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Hackaday Links: June 8, 2025

June 8, 2025 by 21 Comments

When purchasing high-end gear, it’s not uncommon for manufacturers to include a little swag in the box. It makes the customer feel a bit better about the amount of money that just left their wallet, and it’s a great way for the manufacturer to build some brand loyalty and perhaps even get their logo out into the public. What’s not expected, though, is for the swag to be the only thing in the box. That’s what a Redditor reported after a recent purchase of an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090, a GPU that lists for $1,999 but is so in-demand that it’s unobtainium at anything south of $2,600. When the factory-sealed box was opened, the Redditor found it stuffed with two cheap backpacks instead of the card. To add insult to injury, the bags didn’t even sport an Nvidia logo.

The purchase was made at a Micro Center in Santa Clara, California, and an investigation by the store revealed 31 other cards had been similarly tampered with, although no word on what they contained in lieu of the intended hardware. The fact that the boxes were apparently sealed at the factory with authentic anti-tamper tape seems to suggest the substitutions happened very high in the supply chain, possibly even at the end of the assembly line. It’s a little hard to imagine how a factory worker was able to smuggle 32 high-end graphics cards out of the building, so maybe the crime occurred lower down in the supply chain by someone with access to factory seals. Either way, the thief or thieves ended up with almost $100,000 worth of hardware, and with that kind of incentive, this kind of thing will likely happen again. Keep your wits about you when you make a purchase like this.

Continue reading “Hackaday Links: June 8, 2025” →