BIOS Detectives Find Ghost Of Previously Unknown PC

Old parts such as EPROMs will often find themselves for sale on sites such as eBay, where they are sometimes snapped up by retrocomputing enthusiasts in search of interesting code. Vintage Computer Federation forum member [GearTechWolf] picked up a clutch of IBM-labelled chips, and as int10h reports, stumbled upon a previously unknown PC-AT BIOS version which even hints at a rare PC model as yet unseen.

The IBM AT and its various versions are extremely well known in the retro PC world, so while this was quickly identified as an IBM BIOS from 1985 and narrowed down to a member of the AT family, it didn’t fit any of the known versions which shipped with the ubiquitous 1980s computer. Could it have been from an industrial or rack mount variant? It’s a possibility, but the conclusion is that it might contain a patched BIOS version of some kind.

Lacking real hardware, it happily boots on an emulator. It’s another piece of the PC historical jigsaw for people interested in computer history, and with luck in time someone will unearth an example of whatever it came from. If you find it, try a modern OS on it!

hackaday.com/2025/11/08/bios-d…

2025 Component Abuse Challenge: Using Inductors to Steal Power from Qi Wireless Charging Base Station

Over on Hackaday.IO our hacker [bornach] has his entry into the Component Abuse Challenge: Inductors are Wireless Power Sources.

Some time back [bornach] was gifted a Qi wireless charging base station but didn’t own any compatible devices. He had a dig around in his junk box for inductors to attempt coupling to the wireless charger and lucked out with an inductor salvaged from his old inkjet printer.

There are actually open standards, known as the Qi standards, for how to negotiate power from a Qi device. But [bornach] ignored all of that. Instead he leveraged the fact that the Qi base station will periodically send out a “ping” containing a small measure of power to let compatible devices know that it’s available for negotiation. It is the energy in this “ping” that power’s [bornach]’s circuit!

In [bornach]’s circuit a TL431 provides a regulated five volt supply which can be used to drive a microcontroller and a charliplexed array of ten LEDs. Pretty nifty stuff. If you’re new to wireless charging you might like to know How Wireless Charging Works And Why It’s Terrible.

youtube.com/embed/ublL6YgIhoE?…

hackaday.com/2025/11/07/2025-c…

Rust 1.91: il supporto completo per Windows su ARM è arrivato!

Rust ha ricevuto un importante aggiornamento : la versione 1.91 porta ufficialmente il supporto di Windows sui sistemi ARM a 64 bit allo stesso livello di Linux e macOS.

Le build per l’architettura aarch64-pc-windows-msvc sono ora nella classe di compatibilità più elevata, garantendo il superamento di tutti i test e la disponibilità dei binari. Per gli utenti di computer ARM con Windows, questo rende Rust uno strumento completo per lo sviluppo industriale, senza la necessità di compilazione manuale.

Inoltre, le build aarch64-pc-windows-gnullvm e x86_64-pc-windows-gnullvm hanno ottenuto lo stato di Tier 2, avvicinandosi al supporto completo. Il team prevede di aggiungere in futuro i componenti mancanti, inclusi i pacchetti di installazione e gli strumenti LLVM.

Oltre ad ampliare la compatibilità con la piattaforma, l’aggiornamento ha rafforzato il sistema di analisi del codice. Rust 1.91 ora avvisa automaticamente della potenziale creazione di puntatori pendenti se una funzione restituisce riferimenti grezzi a variabili locali.

Questo meccanismo funziona in base agli avvisi, prevenendo potenziali errori che potrebbero portare all’accesso alla memoria liberata. Gli sviluppatori sottolineano che questo non rende il codice non sicuro, ma aiuta a identificare tempestivamente i costrutti pericolosi.

La versione include anche un ampio set di interfacce e funzioni stabilizzate. Tra queste, nuovi metodi per puntatori atomici, operazioni su interi, gestione di percorsi e file system e manipolazione di stringhe e indirizzi IP. Il supporto per alcune API in contesti costanti è stato ampliato, aumentando la flessibilità del linguaggio nella scrittura di codice di basso livello.

Il team di progetto sottolinea che l’aggiornamento non si limita ai miglioramenti tecnici. Continua il lavoro per unificare strumenti e infrastrutture tra i sistemi operativi, per garantire che il supporto di Windows su ARM rimanga alla pari con le piattaforme tradizionali. Gli utenti possono installare la nuova versione tramite Rustup o passare al canale beta per testare le modifiche future.

Rust 1.91 segna una pietra miliare significativa nello sviluppo del linguaggio, consolidando la sua posizione come uno degli strumenti più robusti e affidabili per la programmazione di sistemi, ora con supporto completo per tutte le architetture attuali.

L'articolo Rust 1.91: il supporto completo per Windows su ARM è arrivato! proviene da Red Hot Cyber.

Linux supera il 3% su Steam: un piccolo passo per i gamer, un salto per il pinguino

Windows 10 ha perso il 3,94% degli utenti, Windows 11 ne ha guadagnati solo il 3,18%, e una parte del pubblico ha scelto di abbandonare l’ecosistema Microsoft, orientandosi verso altre piattaforme. Linux ha guidato questa migrazione con una crescita dello 0,41%, raggiungendo una quota complessiva del 3,05%. Anche macOS ha beneficiato della situazione, aumentando dello 0,34% fino al 2,11%.

Nonostante questi numeri, Windows rimane il dominatore assoluto, rappresentando il 94,84% dei giocatori su Steam, con il 63,57% su Windows 11, il 31,14% su Windows 10 e un residuo 0,09% su Windows 7. Tuttavia, la tendenza suggerisce che le alternative stanno lentamente erodendo terreno, segno di una maggiore apertura degli utenti verso altri ecosistemi.

All’interno del mondo Linux, la distribuzione più diffusa tra i gamer è SteamOS, che rappresenta il 27,18% degli utenti Linux su Steam. Seguono Arch Linux con il 10,32%, Linux Mint 22.2 con un significativo aumento del 6,65% e Bazzite, una distribuzione ottimizzata per il gaming che sta rapidamente guadagnando consensi.

Un altro elemento chiave di questa crescita è la compatibilità: quasi il 90% dei giochi progettati per Windows funziona oggi anche su Linux, grazie a tecnologie come Proton e all’impegno costante di Valve. Questo ha eliminato una delle barriere storiche che frenavano la diffusione del sistema operativo nel mondo del gaming.

Valve, forte del successo di Steam Deck, continua a puntare su Linux come base per i suoi progetti futuri. L’azienda starebbe già lavorando a una console domestica basata sullo stesso sistema operativo, con l’obiettivo di portare l’esperienza di gioco Linux anche nel salotto di casa.

Dopo anni di lenta crescita, Linux sta finalmente raccogliendo i frutti del suo percorso. Non è più solo l’alternativa per smanettoni, ma una piattaforma sempre più solida e accessibile anche per i videogiocatori.

L'articolo Linux supera il 3% su Steam: un piccolo passo per i gamer, un salto per il pinguino proviene da Red Hot Cyber.

Boom di malware Android nel 2025: +67% di attacchi rispetto all’anno scorso

Gli analisti della società di sicurezza informatica Zscaler hanno calcolato che tra giugno 2024 e maggio 2025 sono state scoperte 239 app dannose su Google Play, che in totale sono state scaricate più di 42 milioni di volte.

Secondo il rapporto dei ricercatori, il numero di attacchi ai dispositivi mobili è aumentato del 67% nel corso dell’anno. Le minacce principali sono state trojan bancari, spyware e adware.

Il motore principale di questa crescita significativa sono gli attacchi ai pagamenti tramite dispositivi mobili. Gli hacker criminali stanno abbandonando i tradizionali metodi di contraffazione delle carte di credito e puntando sull’ingegneria sociale: phishing, smishing, scambio di SIM e altre forme di frode nei pagamenti.

Mentre lo scorso anno Zscaler aveva contato circa 200 programmi dannosi nell’app store ufficiale di Android, quest’anno ne ha rilevati 239. La minaccia più comune è stata l’adware, che ha rappresentato il 69% di tutti i casi. L’infostealer Joker si è classificato al secondo posto (23%).

Un’altra tendenza è il crescente utilizzo di spyware, in crescita del 220% su base annua. I più comuni tra questi rimangono SpyNote, SpyLoan e BadBazaar, utilizzati a fini di sorveglianza, ricatto e furto di identità.

I malware Android colpiscono più spesso gli utenti in India, Stati Uniti e Canada, rappresentando il 55% degli attacchi. In Italia e Israele, i tassi di infezione sono aumentati dell’800-4000% su base annua.

Nel loro rapporto annuale, i ricercatori individuano tre famiglie di malware particolarmente pericolose e diffuse.

• Anatsa è un trojan bancario che appare periodicamente su Google Play sotto forma di utile utilità e ruba dati dalle app di oltre 830 banche e piattaforme di criptovalute.
• Android Void (Vo1d) è una backdoor per TV box che eseguono versioni precedenti di Android Open Source Project (AOSP) e che ha infettato almeno 1,6 milioni di dispositivi.
• Xnotice è un Trojan RAT che prende di mira chi cerca lavoro nel settore petrolifero e del gas, in particolare in Iran e nelle regioni di lingua araba, rubando credenziali bancarie, codici di autenticazione a due fattori e messaggi SMS.

Gli esperti ricordano agli utenti di installare tempestivamente gli aggiornamenti, di evitare le app che richiedono l’accesso ai servizi di accessibilità, di eseguire la scansione dei dispositivi con Play Protect e di non scaricare app non necessarie.

Inoltre, i ricercatori stanno registrando un aumento degli attacchi ai dispositivi IoT (principalmente router), che vengono infettati tramite varie vulnerabilità e poi diventano parte di botnet e server proxy per la distribuzione di malware.

L'articolo Boom di malware Android nel 2025: +67% di attacchi rispetto all’anno scorso proviene da Red Hot Cyber.

La password più usata nel 2025? E’ ancora “123456”! L’umanità non impara mai

Nel 2025, gli utenti fanno ancora molto affidamento sulle password di base per proteggere i propri account. Uno studio di Comparitech, basato sull’analisi di oltre 2 miliardi di password reali trapelate su forum dedicati alle violazioni dei dati nel corso di un anno, ha rilevato che le password più comuni sono rimaste invariate per molti anni: “123456“, “admin” e “password” rimangono le scelte principali.

Gli analisti dell’azienda hanno stilato una classifica delle 100 password più comuni. La top ten è dominata da sequenze numeriche familiari: “123456“, “12345678“, “123456789” e poi “admin”, “1234”, “Aa123456”, “12345”, “password”, “123” e “1234567890”.

La variante più popolare, “123456“, è apparsa nel database oltre 7,6 milioni di volte, mentre “minecraft”, al 100° posto, è apparsa circa 70.000 volte, senza contare le 20.000 “Password” con iniziale maiuscola.

Circa un quarto delle 1.000 password più comuni è composto esclusivamente da numeri. Quasi il 39% include la sequenza “123” e un altro 2% utilizza la combinazione inversa “321”. La stringa “abc” compare nel 3,1% dei casi. Tra le password minimaliste, spiccano “111111” (18° posto) e persino “********” (35°).

Quasi il 4% di tutte le combinazioni popolari contiene le parole “pass” o “password“, il 2,7% contiene “admin”, l’1,6% contiene “qwerty” e l’1% contiene “welcome“.

Il rapporto ha rilevato che, tra gli esempi a sfondo nazionale, la password “India@123” si è distinta, classificandosi al 53° posto per frequenza. Secondo i ricercatori, tali combinazioni, sebbene meno stereotipate, sono comunque facili da indovinare.

Esaminando la lunghezza delle password, gli esperti hanno notato una tendenza preoccupante: il 65,8% delle combinazioni contiene meno di 12 caratteri, il 6,9% è più corto di otto e solo il 3,2% supera i 16 caratteri. Nel frattempo, la nona password più popolare, “123“, è composta da sole tre cifre, e la quinta più popolare, “1234“, ne contiene quattro.

Grafico: le password più comuni in base alla lunghezza (Comparitech)

Gli autori dello studio sottolineano che i moderni strumenti di hacking possono decifrare password deboli in pochi secondi. Le password corte sono facilmente violabili tramite attacchi brute force e riutilizzare la stessa password su diversi siti web rende gli account vulnerabili ad attacchi brute force con credenziali rubate.

Una password sicura è considerata lunga almeno dodici caratteri, con una combinazione di lettere minuscole e maiuscole, numeri e caratteri speciali. Dovrebbe inoltre essere il più casuale possibile e non contenere schemi riconoscibili. L’autenticazione a due fattori offre una protezione aggiuntiva, impedendo l’hacking anche se la password è compromessa.

La metodologia di ricerca si basa sulla raccolta di set di dati trapelati da forum e canali Telegram. Per garantire l’aggiornamento del materiale, i ricercatori hanno confrontato i dati con i report di fuga di notizie disponibili al pubblico o hanno verificato la data dell’attacco informatico con gli autori delle pubblicazioni.

Sono stati inclusi nell’analisi solo i post confermati risalenti al 2025, con tutte le informazioni personali rese anonime. La classifica si è basata sul numero di occorrenze di ciascuna combinazione univoca nel database ripulito.

L'articolo La password più usata nel 2025? E’ ancora “123456”! L’umanità non impara mai proviene da Red Hot Cyber.

‘No restrictions’ and a secret ‘wink’: Inside Israel’s deal with Google, Amazon

In 2021, Google and Amazon signed a $1.2 billion contract to provide Israel’s government advanced cloud computing and AI services — tools that have facilitated Israel’s two-year onslaught on the Gaza Strip.

Details of the lucrative contract, known as Project Nimbus, were kept secret. A new investigation, in partnership with Local Call and The Guardian, can reveal that both Google and Amazon submitted to highly unorthodox “controls” that Israel inserted into the deal to allay concerns over the secrecy of its data.

Project Nimbus was designed to enable Israel to transfer vast quantities of data onto the cloud servers of the tech giants. But even two years before October 7, Israeli officials drafting the contract had already anticipated the potential for legal challenges against Google and Amazon regarding the use of their technology in the occupied West Bank and Gaza.

According to leaked Israeli Finance Ministry documents obtained by The Guardian — including a finalized version of the contract — and sources familiar with the negotiations, the deal prohibits Google and Amazon from restricting Israel’s use of their products, even if it breaches their terms of service. The contract also obliges the two tech giants to secretly notify Israel if foreign courts order them to hand over data stored on their cloud platforms, in the event of claims that Israel has used the technology to violate the human rights of Palestinians — effectively sidestepping their legal obligations.

This arrangement stands in contrast to the case of Microsoft, which recently revoked the Israeli military’s access to parts of its Azure platform after +972, Local Call, and The Guardian revealed that it had stored a trove of intercepted Palestinian phone calls, in violation of its terms of service. Under Project Nimbus, however, Google and Amazon are forbidden from taking such action.

This investigation builds on a series of joint exposés revealing how major U.S.-based tech companies have become deeply entangled in Israel’s wars and mass surveillance apparatus.

972mag.com/project-nimbus-cont…

dicorinto.it/news/no-restricti…

La minaccia al settore sanitario italiano

L’Agenzia per la Cybersicurezza Nazionale ha aggiornato il Report sul rischio nel settore sanitario a cavallo del periodo che va da gennaio 2023 a settembre 2025, con nuovi dati, analisi e raccomandazioni.

Il motivo è che il settore sanitario, a livello globale, continua a essere tra quelli maggiormente impattati in caso di attacchi cyber. In media, infatti, da gennaio 2023 si sono verificati 4,3 attacchi informatici al mese ai danni di strutture sanitarie. Di questi, circa la metà ha dato luogo a incidenti con un impatto effettivo sui servizi erogati (in termini di disponibilità e riservatezza), causandone talvolta il blocco con gravi ripercussioni a danno dell’utenza e mettendo a rischio la privacy dei pazienti.

Nel periodo da gennaio 2025 a settembre 2025 il numero complessivo degli eventi cyber è aumentato di circa il 40% rispetto allo stesso intervallo del 2024. Il CSIRT Italia ha infatti censito 60 eventi a fronte dei 42 rilevati nell’anno recedente. Il numero di incidenti è però diminuito: 23 rispetto ai 47 del 2024, anno in cui un unico attacco di tipo supply chain causò 31 incidenti in altrettanti soggetti.

Tra le principali tipologie di minacce rilevate nei primi nove mesi del 2025 ci sono: scansione attiva su credenziali, phishing, compromissione delle caselle e-mail e esposizione dati. Ciò a conferma della centralità del vettore e-mail e dell’utilizzo di tecniche basate sull’ingegneria sociale per la diffusione di campagne malevole. Gli attacchi di tipo ransomware, nel 2025, sono diminuiti, ma continuano a rappresentare la tipologia di minaccia con l’impatto più elevato.

Il Report evidenzia che molti attacchi informatici hanno successo perché spesso vengono trascurate, o mal implementate, le più basilari misure di cybersicurezza con una carente formazione specifica del personale impiegato in ospedali, centri medici, cliniche e altre strutture sanitarie.
Per contrastare queste vulnerabilità, l’ACN suggerisce raccomandazioni mirate, tra cui la necessità di implementare pratiche di sicurezza robuste e una governance centralizzata della cybersecurity. Un approccio programmatico, basato sulla gestione del rischio e sulla separazione dei ruoli, è essenziale per rafforzare la sicurezza dei sistemi sanitari e prevenire gli incidenti informatici.

Leggi il report

dicorinto.it/agenzia-per-la-cy…

OldVersion.com Archive Facing Shutdown Due to Financing Issues

Finding older versions of particular software can be a real chore, all too often only made possible by the sheer grace and benevolence of their creators. At the same time older versions of software can be the only way to dodge undesirable ‘upgrades’, track down regressions, do historical research, set up a retro computer system, and so on. This is where an archive like OldVersion.com (HTTP only so your browser may shout at you) is incredibly useful, offering thousands of installers for software covering a number of platforms.

Unfortunately, as noted on the website, they recently lost their main source of incoming in the form of Google advertising. This means that after launching in 2001, this archive may have to be shut down before long. Confusingly, trying to visit the blog throws a HTTP 503 error, and visiting the forum currently forces a redirect to a random news site unless you can mash that Esc button really fast, perhaps as alternative advertising partners are being trialed, or due to a hack.

Although these days we have sites like Archive.org to do more large scale archiving, OldVersion.com is special for being focused and well-organized, along with a long and rich history that would be a shame to lose. We have referenced the site in the past for old versions as far back as 2008. Hopefully we’ll soon find out more about what is going on with the archive and what its future will be.

Thanks to [Philip Perry] for the tip.

hackaday.com/2025/11/07/oldver…

Screen-Accurate Lightsaber As a Practical Effect

The lightsaber was one of the coolest and most iconic visual effects from the original Star Wars, and people have been trying to get that particular piece of movie magic off the silver screen for about 40 years now. [HeroTech] seems to have cracked the code with their “Impossible Lightsaber”— it’s fully retractable, fully lit, and able to hit things (lightly), all while fitting into a replica prop handle.

The secret is… well, there’s more than one secret, here. The blade itself is made out of a “magician’s cane”, which is a coil of plastic that can spring outwards on demand for magic tricks. Hidden inside of it is a strip of LED lights. Of course one strip of LEDs would not be omnidirectional, and the magician’s cane is pretty floppy, but both of those problems are solved by the same idea: “I’ll try spinning. That’s a good trick.”

The spin-stabilized blade holds up to being waved around much better, and apparently the gyroscopic forces it induces are actually lore-accurate. (Who knew?) Of course fitting a motor to spin the “blade”, and another to winch it back in, along with the circuitry and batteries to drive them was no mean feat. It’s impressive they fit it all inside the replica handle; even more impressive that they fit a speaker so this prop even makes the iconic sound effects. We always wanted to see a stage production of William Shakespeare’s Star Wars, and this gives us verily, a new hope.

[HeroTech] isn’t done yet– while seemingly impossible, this lightsaber isn’t perfect, as it’s not rugged enough for full dueling. It’s also not easy to put together, and apparently can’t handle the delicate attentions of airline baggage handlers. So ruggedization and a bit of design-for-assembly are on the table for the next version. Sadly the project is not open source; they are releasing the build files to subscribers only. Given how much work must have gone into iterating to get to this point, that is disappointing, but understandable. Everybody needs to make a living, after all.

If this project seems familiar, it’s because we featured a much-bulkier previous iteration last year.

You may prefer your lightsabers to match the movie version in effects instead of visuals; if that’s the case, check out this saber that uses HHO to cut through a steel door.

youtube.com/embed/0QArAMtBGx8?…

hackaday.com/2025/11/07/screen…

Medium Format, 3 GigaPixel Camera Puts It All On the Line (Sensor)

It’s a bit of a truism that bigger sensors lead to better pictures when it comes to photography. Of course everyone who isn’t a photographer knows that moar megapixles is moar better. So, when [Gigawipf], aka [Yannick Richter] wanted to make a camera, he knew he had to go big or go home. So big he went: a medium format camera with a whopping 3.2 gigapixel resolution.

Now, getting a hold of a sensor like that is not easy, and [Yannick] didn’t even try. The hack starts by tearing down a couple of recent-model Kodak scanners from eBay to get at those sweet CCD line sensors. Yes, this is that classic hack: the scanner camera. Then it’s off to the oscilloscope and the datasheet for some serious reverse-engineering to figure out how to talk to these things. Protocol analysis starts about 4 minutes in of the embedded video, and is worth watching even if you have no interest in photography.

As for what the line sensor will be talking to, why, it’s nothing other than a Rasberry Pi 5, interfacing through a custom PCB that also holds the stepper driver. Remember this is a line sensor camera: the sensor needs to be scanned across the image plane inside the camera, line by line, just as it is in the scanner. He’s using off-the-shelf linear rails to do that job. Technically we suppose you could use a mirror to optically scan the image across a fixed sensor, but scanner cameras have traditionally done it this way and [Yannick] is keeping with tradition. Why not? It works.

Since these images are going to be huge an SD card in the Pi doesn’t cut it, so this is perhaps the only camera out there with an NVMe SSD. The raw data would be 19 GB per image, and though he’s post-processing on the fly to PNG they’re still big pictures. There probably aren’t too many cameras sporting 8″ touchscreens out there, either, but since the back of the thing is so large, why not? There’s still a CSI camera inside, too, but in this case it’s being used as a digital viewfinder. (Most of us would have made that the camera.) The scanner cam is, of course, far too slow to generate its own previews. The preview camera actually goes onto the same 3D-printed mount as the line sensor, putting it onto the same focal plane as the sensor. Yes, the real-time previews are used to focus the camera.

In many ways, this is the nicest scanner camera we’ve ever featured, but that’s perhaps to be expected: there have been a lot of innovations to facilitate this build since scanner cams were common. Even the 3D printed and aluminum case is professional looking. Of course a big sensor needs a big lens, and after deciding projector lenses weren’t going to cut it, [Yannick] sprung for Pantax 6×7 system lenses, which are made for medium format cameras like this one. Well, not exactly like this one– these lenses were first made for film cameras in the 60s. Still, they offer a huge image, high-quality optics, and manual focus and aperture controls in a format that was easy to 3D-print a mount for.

Is it the most practical camera? Maybe not. Is it an impressive hack? Yes. We’ve always had a soft-spot for scanner cameras, and a in a recent double-ccd camera hack, we were lamenting in the comments that nobody was doing it anymore. So we’re very grateful to [Manawyrm] for sending in the tip.

youtube.com/embed/KSvjJGbFCws?…

hackaday.com/2025/11/07/medium…

2025 Component Abuse Challenge: Pushing a 555 to the Limit

The humble 555 timer has its origins back in the early 1970s as the NE555, a bipolar integrated circuit. Over the years it has spawned a range of derivatives, including dual versions, and ones using CMOS technology. Have these enhancements improved the performance of the chip significantly? [MagicWolfi] has been pushing the envelope in an effort to see just how fast an astable 555 can be.

The Microchip MIC1555 may be the newest of the bunch, a 5-pin CMOS SOT-23 which has lost the frequency control and discharge pins of the original. It’s scarcely less versatile though, and it’s a fine candidate for an oscillator to push. We see it at a range of values for the capacitor and resistor in an astable configuration, each of which is tested across the supply voltage range. It’s rated as having a maximum frequency of 5 MHz, but with a zero Ohm resistor and only the parasitic capacitance of an open circuit, it reaches the giddy heights of 9.75 MHz. If we’re honest we find this surprising, but on reflection the chip would never be a first choice for super-fast operation.

We like it that someone’s managed to tie in the 555 to the contest, and given that it still has a few days to run at the time of writing, we’re hoping some of you might be inspired to enter one of your own.

hackaday.com/2025/11/07/2025-c…

Hackaday Podcast Episode 344: Board with Lasers, Op-Amp Torture, and Farewell Supercon 9

Hackaday Editors Tom Nardi and Al Williams spent the weekend at Supercon and had to catch up on all the great hacks. Listen in as they talk about their favorites. Plus, stick around to the end to hear about some of the highlights from their time in Pasadena.

If you’re still thinking about entering the Component Abuse Contest, you’re just about out of time. Need some inspiration? Tom and Al talk about a few choice entries, and discuss how pushing parts out of their comfort zone can come in handy. Do you make your own PCBs? With vias? If you have a good enough laser, you could. Or maybe you’d rather have a $10 Linux server? Just manage your expectations. The guys both admit they aren’t mechanical geniuses and, unlike [4St4r], aren’t very good at guessing sounds either. They round up with some 3D printing projects and a collection of quick hacks.

Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

html5-player.libsyn.com/embed/…

Download in DRM-free MP3 no PDP-1, 3D Printer, or lasers needed to listen.

Where to Follow Hackaday Podcast

Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:

• iTunes
• Spotify
• Stitcher
• RSS
• YouTube
• Check out our Libsyn landing page

Episode 344 Show Notes:

News:

• Component Abuse Challenge

What’s that Sound?

• Congratulate [4St4r] for guessing last week’s sound. Want a Hackaday Podcast T-shirt? Try your luck next week.

Interesting Hacks of the Week:

• Is This The Last PCB You’ll Ever Buy?
• 2025 Component Abuse Challenge: Weigh With A TL074
• Repurposing Dodgy Android TV Boxes As Linux Boxes
• Reproduced And Recovered: The First Chinese Keyboard-based MingKwai Typewriter
• Print In Place Pump Pushes Limits Of Printing
• 3D Printering: Liquid-Filled Filament Was Not On Our Bingo Card

Quick Hacks:

• Tom’s Picks:
  
  • CardFlix: NFC Cards For Kid-Friendly Streaming Magic
  • Print-and-Clamp: Rubber Band PCB Stand Slides Into Duty
  • SolidWorks Certification… With FreeCAD?

  
  

• Al’s Picks:
  
  • Multitasking On The Humble Z80 CPU
  • Simple Device Can Freeze Wi-Fi Camera Feeds
  • 2025 Component Abuse Challenge: An Input Is Now An Output

  
  

Supercon 9:

• Crafting the Final Frontier Keynote
• Announcing The 2025 Hackaday Superconference Communicator Badge

hackaday.com/2025/11/07/hackad…

An LED Projector as a Lighting Effect

If you had an array of high power addressable LEDs, how would you project them onto a wall? Perhaps you’d use a Fresnel lens, or maybe an individual lens on the top of each. [Joo] faced this problem when making a lighting effect using just such an array, and the solution they came up with used both.

The problem facing a would-be LED array projector is that should the lens be too good, it will project the individual points of light from the LEDs themselves, when a more diffuse point is required. Thus the Fresnel required the aid of a separate array of lenses, resin printed in one in clear plastic. From this we get some useful tips on how to do this for best lens quality, and while the result is not quite optically perfect, it’s certainly good enough for the job in hand.

The linked Printables page comes with all you need to make the parts, and you too can have your own projected LED effect. Now we want one, too! Perhaps we really need our own Wrencher signal instead.

hackaday.com/2025/11/07/an-led…

This Week in Security: Bogus Ransom, WordPress Plugins, and KASLR

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…

First off, there are plenty of open source projects that have employee contributors, and it’s quite odd to imply otherwise. But second, for something as important as an office suite, this is a rather startling statement: there are no paid employees working on the OpenOffice code base.

NPM Typosquat Sophistication

There’s another NPM typosquatting campaign, which is barely news at this point. This one is newsworthy because these malicious packages use multiple layers of obfuscation, and lived on NPM for over four months. They use a clever bit of social engineering during package installation, in the form of a fake CAPTCHA prompt. The idea is that it makes the user less suspicious of the package, and also gives a legitimate reason for network access. But in reality, requiring user interaction defeats any automated analysis efforts.

The first layer of obfuscation consists of an eval() call with a bunch of decoder functions and an ugly encoded string. The result from that set of functions is URL-encoded and needed decoding, followed by an XOR with a key value. And finally, the executable function that finally emerges uses switch/case statements and hard-to-read values. It’s just a web to work through.

The payload behavior is boring in comparison, looking for any credentials on the system and uploading them to a remote server. It also checks for interesting browser cookies and passwords in the password manager, and any authentication tokens it can find.

WordPress Plugin Problems

[István Márton] at Wordfence has the story on a pair of WordPress plugins with severe vulnerabilities, effecting a whopping 500,000 sites combined. Up first is AI Engine, with 100,000 installs. This plugin has an unauthenticated URL endpoint that can expose a bearer token, which then allows access to the MCP endpoint, and arbitrary control of users. The good news here is that the plugin is not vulnerable by default, and requires the “No-Auth URL” setting to be configured to be vulnerable.

The other plugin is Post SMTP, with 400,000 installs. It replaces WordPress’s PHP email handling, and one of the features is the ability to view those emails from the logs. The problem was that before 3.6.1, viewing those email logs didn’t require any permissions. At first blush, that may seem like a medium severity problem, but WordPress is often configured to allow for password resets via emailed links, which means instant account takeover. Both issues have been fixed, and releases are available.

React Native CLI and Metro

A combination of the React Native CLI package and the Metro development server exposed React Native developers to a nasty 9.8 CVSS Remote Code Execution (RCE) CVE. The first element of this vulnerability is the fact that when Metro opens ports for hosting development work, it doesn’t bind to localhost, but listens on all interfaces by default.

When a new Reactive Native project is created without using a framework, some boilerplate code is run as part of the initialization. The end result is that /open-url handler is added to the project, and this handler calls open() with an outside string from the URL. It’s not hard to imagine how this can be abused for arbitrary code injection.

KASLR

Let’s talk about address randomization. Specifically, Kernel Address Space Layout Randomization (KASLR). It’s one of the defenses against turning an arbitrary memory write into a working exploit. If an attacker can’t predict where kernel objects will be in memory, twiddling bits is more likely to crash the system than result in code execution. It’s great in theory. The problem is that it doesn’t necessarily exist in reality.

That’s the story from [Seth Jenkins] at Google’s Project Zero, who was looking for ways to crack Pixel phones. It turns out that memory hotplugging is supported by Linux on Android, and that potential hotplug memory needs a lot of room in the linear memory map. So much room that it’s impractical to also randomize that layout. So while we still technically have KASLR protecting the kernel from attacks, there’s a really big gotcha in the form of the linear memory map.

Bits and Bytes

If you want a really deep dive into how BLE works, and how to investigate an existing BLE connection with an SDR, [Clément Ballabriga] from Lexfo has the scoop. It is significantly more complicated than you might expect, particularly since BLE uses frequency hopping, and a wide enough range of frequencies that your SDR almost certainly can’t capture them all at once. That means breaking a tiny part of the signal security, in order to accurately predict the frequency hops.

Cisco’s Unified Contact Center Express (UCCX) has several vulnerabilities that allows an attacker to run code as root. One vulnerability is in handling arbitrary file uploads by the Java Remote Method Invocation system. Another is an authentication bypass that can be exploited by coercing the target system to use a malicious remote server as part of the authentication process. Fixes are available, and so far it doesn’t look like these flaws have been used in the wild.

And finally, there’s the November Android security bulletin, that fixes CVE-2025-48593, a logic error in security updates in apexd.cpp that can lead to escalation of privilege.

I’ve seen this flaw conflated with CVE-2025-38593, a Bluetooth vulnerability recently fixed in the Linux kernel. This is a medium severity race condition in the kernel that can lead to a double-free and a system crash. There doesn’t seem to be a way to turn this into an RCE, as is reflected by its CVSS of 4.7.

hackaday.com/2025/11/07/this-w…

Pi-Powered Camera Turns Heads and Lenses In Equal Measure

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.

youtube.com/embed/UntZmKj_IJE?…

hackaday.com/2025/11/07/pi-pow…