2025 Component Abuse Challenge: Weigh With A TL074

The late and lamented [Bob Pease] was one of a select band of engineers, each of whose authority in the field of analogue integrated circuit design was at the peak of the art. So when he remarks on something in his books, it’s worth taking notice. It was just such an observation that caught the eye of [Trashtronic]; that the pressure on a precision op-amp from curing resin could be enough to change the device’s offset voltage. Could this property be used for something? The op-amp as a load cell was born!

The result is something of an op-amp torture device, resembling a small weighing machine with a couple of DIP-8 packages bearing the load. Surprisingly modest weights will change the offset voltage, though it was found that the value will drift over time.

This is clearly an experimental project and not a practical load cell, but it captures the essence of the 2025 Component Abuse Challenge of which it forms a part. Finding completely unexpected properties of components doesn’t always have to lead to useful results, and we’re glad someone had done this one just to find out whether or not it works. You still just about have time for an entry yourself if you fancy giving it a go.

hackaday.com/2025/11/04/2025-c…

Jenny’s Daily Drivers: ReactOS 0.4.15

When picking operating systems for a closer look here in the Daily Drivers series, the aim has not been to merely pick the next well-known Linux distro off the pile, but to try out the interesting, esoteric or minority OS. The need remains to use it as a daily driver though, so each one we try has to have at least some chance of being a useful everyday environment in which a Hackaday piece could be written. With some of them such as the then-current BSD or Slackware versions we tried for interest’s sake a while back that’s not a surprising achievement, but for the minority operating systems it’s quite a thing. Today’s choice, ReactOS 0.4.15, is among the closest we’ve come so far to that ideal.

For The N’th Time In The Last 20 Years, I download A ReactOS ISO

It’s fair to say there are still a few quirks, but it works.
ReactOS is an open-source clone of a Windows operating system from the early 2000s, having a lot on common with Windows XP. It started in the late 1990s and has slowly progressed ever since, making periodic releases that, bit-by-bit, have grown into a usable whole. I last looked at it for Hackaday with version 0.4.13 in 2020, so have five years made any difference? Time to download that ISO and give it a go.

Installing ReactOS has that bright blue and yellow screen feeling of a Windows install from around the millennium, but I found it to be surprisingly quick and pain free despite a few messages about unidentified hardware. The display driver it chose was a VESA one but since it supported all my monitor’s resolutions and colour depths that’s not the hardship it might once have been.

Once installed, the feeling is completely of a Windows desktop from that era except for the little ReactOS logo on the Start menu. I chose the classic Windows 95 style theme as I never liked the blue of Windows XP. Everything sits where you remember it and has the familiar names, and if you used a Microsoft computer in those days you’re immediately at home. There’s even a web browser, but since it’s the WINE version of Internet Explorer and dates from the Ark, we’re guessing you’ll want to replace it.

Most Of The Old Software You Might Need…

Hello GIMP 2.6, my old friend!
There’s a package manager to download and run open-source software, something which naturally Windows never had. Back in 2020 I found this to be the Achilies’ heel of the OS, with very little able to install and run without crashing, so i was very pleased to note that this situation has changed. Much of the software is out of date due to needing Windows XP compatibility, but I found it to be much more usable and stable. There’s a choice of web browsers but the Firefox and Chromium versions are too old to be useful, but I found its K-Meleon version to be the most recent of the bunch. Adding GIMP to my installed list, I was ready to try this OS as my daily driver.

I am very pleased to report that using K-Meleon and GIMP on ReactOS 0.4.15, I could do my work as a Hackaday writer and editor. This piece was in part written using it, and Hackaday’s WordPress backend is just the same as in Firefox on my everyday Manjaro Linux machine. There however the good news ends, because I’m sorry to report that the experience was at times a little slow and painful. Perhaps that’s the non-up-to-date hardware I’d installed it on, but it’s evident that 2025 tasks are a little taxing for an OS with its roots in 2003. That said it remained a usable experience, and I could just about do my job were I marooned on a desert island with my creaking old laptop and ReactOS.

… And It Works, Too!

So ReactOS 0.4.15 is a palpable hit, an OS that can indeed be a Daily Driver. It’s been a long time, but at last ReactOS seems mature enough to use. I have to admit that I won’t be making the switch though, but who should be thinking about it? I think perhaps back in 2020 I got it right, in suggesting that as a pretty good facsimile of Windows XP it is best thought of as an OS for people who need XP bur for whom the venerable OS is now less convenient. It’s more than just a retrocomputing platform, instead it’s a supported alternative to the abandonware original for anyone with hardware or software from that era which still needs to run. Just like FreeDOS is now the go-to place for people who need DOS, so if they continue on this trajectory, should ReactOS become for those needing a classic Windows. Given the still-installed rump of software and computer controlled machinery which runs XP, that could I think become a really useful niche to occupy.

hackaday.com/2025/11/04/jennys…

Furto del Louvre: Windows 2000 e Windows XP nelle reti oltre che a password banali

I ladri sono entrati attraverso una finestra del secondo piano del Musée du Louvre, ma il museo aveva avuto anche altri problemi oltre alle finestre non protette, secondo un rapporto di audit sulla sicurezza informatica risalente a un decennio fa e ora venuto alla luce.

Sebbene la Ministra della Cultura Rachida Dati abbia affermato che «i sistemi di sicurezza del museo non hanno fallito», tutto suggerisce che si siano comunque verificate alcune violazioni della sicurezza informatica.

Secondo documenti riservati consultati dal quotidiano Libération, nel 2014 bastava digitare “LOUVRE” per accedere al server responsabile della videosorveglianza del museo più famoso della Francia. Oppure digitare “THALES” per avere accesso al software pubblicato dall’omonima azienda.

Queste password, che in gergo tecnico si chiamano “di default” o “predicibili banali”, erano già definite dall’ANSSI (Agenzia nazionale per la sicurezza informatica francese) come un grave rischio. Le stesse segnalavano che «la rete degli uffici del Museo del Louvre include anche sistemi obsoleti» come Windows 2000 — che non garantiva più né il blocco delle sessioni né aggiornamenti antivirus.

L’ANSSI aveva verificato tutto ciò con un audit interno del 2014. Microsoft aveva smesso di fornire aggiornamenti di sicurezza per Windows 2000 già nel luglio 2010. Nell’audit erano contenute raccomandazioni ben precise: usare password più complesse, migrare il software su versioni supportate, correggere le vulnerabilità. Ma il museo non ha risposto se abbia effettivamente seguito queste indicazioni.

Un secondo audit fu condotto nel 2017 dall’INHESJ (Istituto Nazionale di Studi Avanzati sulla Sicurezza e la Giustizia) e rilevò che «alcune postazioni di lavoro hanno sistemi operativi obsoleti (Windows 2000 e Windows XP) che non garantiscono più una sicurezza efficace (nessun aggiornamento antivirus, nessuna password o blocco di sessione…)». Microsoft interruppe il supporto esteso per Windows XP nel 2014.

Vent’anni di debito tecnico hanno gravato pesantemente sulla sicurezza del Louvre, con il continuo accumulo di sistemi di videosorveglianza analogica, videosorveglianza digitale, antintrusione e controllo accessi, alcuni dei quali con server dedicati o applicazioni proprietarie. Alcuni di questi sono diventati obsoleti nel tempo e avrebbero richiesto aggiornamenti o sostituzioni.

L'articolo Furto del Louvre: Windows 2000 e Windows XP nelle reti oltre che a password banali proviene da Red Hot Cyber.

SesameOp: il malware che usa OpenAI Assistants per il Comando e Controllo

Microsoft ha scoperto un nuovo malware, denominato SesameOp, e ha pubblicato i dettagli del suo funzionamento. Questa backdoor era insolita: i suoi creatori utilizzavano l’API OpenAI Assistants come canale di controllo nascosto, consentendo loro di mascherare l’attività all’interno del sistema infetto ed eludere i tradizionali strumenti di rilevamento.

L’attacco è stato scoperto nel luglio 2025 durante le indagini su un attacco complesso, durante il quale un gruppo sconosciuto è rimasto presente nell’infrastruttura della vittima per diversi mesi.

L’identità dell’organizzazione presa di mira non è stata rivelata, ma l’indagine ha rivelato la presenza di un’ampia rete di web shell interne e processi dannosi mascherati da legittime utility di Visual Studio. Il codice dannoso è stato iniettato tramite AppDomainManager: un file di configurazione modificato ha istruito l’eseguibile a caricare la libreria dinamica Netapi64.dll contenente logica dannosa.

La libreria è stata pesantemente offuscata utilizzando Eazfuscator.NET, garantendo una maggiore invisibilità. Ha svolto la funzione di loader per il modulo .NET OpenAIAgent.Netapi64, che richiedeva istruzioni tramite l’API OpenAI Assistants. I comandi ricevuti venivano prima decriptati, quindi eseguiti in un thread separato e i risultati dell’esecuzione venivano restituiti tramite la stessa API . Pertanto, l’ infrastruttura OpenAI è stata efficacemente utilizzata come nodo di controllo intermedio, non rilevabile durante l’analisi del traffico di rete.

La comunicazione tra il malware e il server di comando e controllo avviene tramite messaggi contenenti parametri chiave nel campo descrizione. Questi possono includere il comando SLEEP (per sospendere temporaneamente l’attività), il comando Payload (per eseguire istruzioni nidificate) e il comando Result (per restituire i risultati dell’esecuzione all’operatore dell’attacco).

Sebbene l’identità degli aggressori rimanga sconosciuta, lo schema in sé dimostra una tendenza a sfruttare servizi cloud legittimi per un controllo occulto. Ciò complica il rilevamento degli attacchi, poiché il traffico non supera il normale utilizzo delle API aziendali. Dopo aver ricevuto la notifica da Microsoft, il team di OpenAI ha condotto una revisione interna, identificato la chiave sospetta e bloccato l’account associato.

Secondo Microsoft, l’utilizzo di SesameOp indica un tentativo deliberato di ottenere l’accesso a lungo termine all’infrastruttura e di controllare i computer infetti all’insaputa dei proprietari. La piattaforma API OpenAI Assistants, attraverso la quale veniva esercitato il controllo, verrà disattivata nell’agosto 2026 e sostituita dalla nuova API Responses.

L'articolo SesameOp: il malware che usa OpenAI Assistants per il Comando e Controllo proviene da Red Hot Cyber.

Rocket Roll Control, The Old Fashioned Way

The vast majority of model rockets go vaguely up and float vaguely downwards without a lot of control. However, [newaysfactory] built a few rockets that were altogether more precise in their flight, thanks to his efforts to master active roll control.

[newaysfactory] started this work a long time ago, well before Arduinos, ESP32s, and other highly capable microcontroller platforms were on the market. In an era when you had to very much roll your own gear from the ground up, he whipped up a rocket control system based around a Microchip PIC18F2553. He paired it with a L3G4200D gyro, an MPXH6115A barometer, and an MMA2202KEG accelerometer, chosen for its ability to provide useful readings under high G acceleration. He then explains how these sensor outputs were knitted together to keep a rocket flying straight and true under active control.

[newaysfactory] didn’t just master roll control for small rockets; he ended up leveraging this work into a real career working on fully-fledged autopilot systems. Sometimes your personal projects can take your career in interesting directions.

youtube.com/embed/AFb85zKAyqU?…

hackaday.com/2025/11/04/rocket…

Lithium-Ion Batteries: WHY They Demand Respect

This summer, we saw the WHY (What Hackers Yearn) event happen in Netherlands, of course, with a badge to match. Many badges these days embrace the QWERTY computer aesthetic, which I’m personally genuinely happy about. This one used 18650 batteries for power, in a dual parallel cell configuration… Oh snap, that’s my favourite LiIon cell in my favourite configuration, too! Surely, nothing bad could happen?

Whoops. That one almost caught me by surprise, I have to shamefully admit. I just genuinely love 18650 cells, in all glory they bring to hardware hacking, and my excitement must’ve blindsided me. They’re the closest possible entity to a “LiIon battery module”, surprisingly easy to find in most corners of this planet, cheap to acquire in large quantities, easy to interface to your projects, and packing a huge amount of power. It’s a perfect cell for many applications I and many other hackers hold dear.

Sadly, the 18650 cells were a bad choice for the WHY badge, for multiple reasons at once. If you’re considering building a 18650-based project, or even a product, let me show you what exactly made these cells a bad fit, and how you might be able to work around those limitations on your own journey. There’s plenty of technical factors, but I will tell you about the social factors, because these create the real dealbreaker here.

Three Thousand Participants

The main social factor can be boiled down to this – a 18650-powered WHY badge can start a fire through being touched by a 5 cent coin, a keychain, or a metal zipper of someone’s jacket. This is not a dealbreaker for an individual hacker who’s conscious of the risk, though it’s certainly an unwise choice. For three thousand participants? You have no chance.

A 18650 cell is like a bigger sister to an AA battery – power at your fingertips, just, you’re playing with heaps more power. You can take a 18650 cell and have it power a small yet nimble robot on wheels, or an ultra powerful flashlight, or a handheld radio packing quite a transmit power punch. You can release its power on accident, too, and that gets nasty quick.

Short-circuiting a 18650 cell is a surprisingly straightforward way to melt metal, and by extent, start a small fire. It’s also not that hard to short-circuit a 18650 cell, especially and specifically unprotected ones. This is a big part of why consumer oriented gadgets use AAs instead of 18650s – it’s perhaps less powerful, sure, but it’s also a significantly less dangerous cell.

The Instructions, They Do Nothing!

WHY sold a little over 3700 tickets. I would not expect 100% attendance, but I’m comfortable saying it must’ve been around three thousand people. Sadly, “three thousand people” is far beyond the point when you can hope to give people handling instructions for something as easy to mishandle as LiIon cells, even for a nominally hacker audience.

Of course, you can try and give people instructions. You can talk to each badge recipient individually, release booklets demonstrating what to do and not to do with a 18650 cell, add silkscreen instructions for a just-in-place reminder, or maybe have them sign a release form, though it’s unlikely that kind of trick would be legal in the EU. Sadly, WHY organizers never came close to doing any of these things. It also wouldn’t really matter if they did. These instructions will always, inevitably be outright ignored by a sizeable percentage of users.

Handling unprotected batteries requires cautiousness and some helper equipment. You can’t hope to transplant the cautiousness, at most you can try and issue the equipment. Which equipment? A small storage cases for the cells (must have when transporting them!), as well as a case for the badge, at the very least; to my knowledge, the WHY didn’t issue either of these stock. An ESD bag doesn’t qualify if it doesn’t permanently cover the badge’s back, because any temporary protection is nullified by a budding hacker getting tired of carrying two 18650 cells on their neck, and throwing the badge into the tent without looking. Where does it land? Hopefully not onto something metal.

You can build a badge or any sort of other device using unprotected 18650s, which expects the end user to handle them, like the WHY badge does, and it will be more or less safe as long as the end user is yourself, with 18650 handling experience that I’m sure is to match. Giving it to a friend, caseless? You can talk to your friend and explain 18650 handling basics to them, sure, but you’re still running some degree of risk. My hunch is, your friend could very well refuse such a gift outright. Giving it to a hundred people? You’re essentially playing with fire at someone else’s house.

Just Why Did That Happen?

Hackaday has traditionally used AA cells for our badges, which has definitely help us mostly avoid any Lithium-related issues. Most other conferences have been using pouch cells, which traditionally come with short-circuit protection and don’t threaten to ignite stuff from contact with a piece of metal. 18650 cells are not even cheaper at scale – they’re nice, sure, I wrote as much, but those nice things are quickly negated by the whole “firestarter” thing.

On the other hand, 18650 cells do work for a hacker or a small team of hackers skilled enough to stay cautious, and it also works well at scale when the cell is permanently encased within the shell, like in most powerbanks and laptops. It fails as soon as you expect people to plug batteries in and out, or carry them separately. Respecting Lithium-Ion batteries means being aware of their shortcomings, and for 18650 cells, that means you should avoid having people manually handle them at scale.

Here’s the kicker about the WHY badge situation. I was confused by the WHY badge switching to 18650 cells this year, away from overcurrent-protected pouch cells, which were used by previous iterations of WHY (MCH, SHA) without an issue in sight. So, I’ve asked around, and what I got from multiple sources is – the 18650 usage decision was pushed top-down, with little regard for physical safety. Sadly, this makes sense – it’s how we saw it implemented, too.

hackaday.com/2025/11/04/lithiu…

Making Audible Sense Of A Radiation Hunt

The clicking of a Geiger counter is well enough known as a signifier of radioactive materials, due to it providing the menacing sound effect any time a film or TV show deals with radiation. What we’re hearing is the electronic detection of an ionization event in a Geiger-Muller tube due to alpha or beta radiation, which is great, but we’re not detecting gamma radiation.

For that a scintillation detector is required, but these are so sensitive to background radiation as to make the clicking effect relatively useless as an indicator to human ears. Could a microcontroller analyse the click rate and produce an audible indication? This is the basis of [maurycyz]’s project, adding a small processor board to a Ludlum radiation meter.

When everything sounds like a lot of clicks, an easy fix might be to use a divider to halve the number and make concentrations of clicks sound more obvious. It’s a strategy with merit, but one that results in weaker finds being subsumed. Instead the approach here is to take a long-term background reading, and compare the instantaneous time between clicks with it. Ths any immediate click densities can be highlighted, and those which match the background can be ignored. SO in goes an AVR128 for which the code can be found at the above link.

The result is intended for rock prospecting, a situation where it’s much more desirable to listen to the clicks than look at the meter as you scan the lumps of dirt. It’s not the first project in this line we’ve brought you, another one looked at the scintillation probe itself.

hackaday.com/2025/11/04/making…

Hacker cinesi prendono di mira le agenzie diplomatiche europee (anche l’Italia)

Il gruppo di hacker UNC6384 (noto anche come Mustang Panda), legato alla Cina, sta conducendo una campagna di cyberspionaggio su larga scala che prende di mira agenzie diplomatiche e governative europee.

Secondo Arctic Wolf e StrikeReady, gli hacker stanno sfruttando una vulnerabilità di Windows non corretta relativa alle scorciatoie LNK. Gli attacchi sono stati registrati in Ungheria, Belgio, Italia, Paesi Bassi e Serbia tra settembre e ottobre 2025.

Secondo i ricercatori, gli attacchi iniziano con email di phishing mirate contenenti URL a file LNK dannosi. L’oggetto di queste email si riferisce in genere a workshop NATO sugli appalti per la difesa, riunioni della Commissione Europea sulla facilitazione delle frontiere e altri eventi diplomatici multilaterali.

I file dannosi sfruttano la vulnerabilità CVE-2025-9491 (punteggio CVSS 7.0), che si verifica nella gestione dei collegamenti di Windows. Questo bug consente di nascondere argomenti dannosi della riga di comando all’interno dei file .LNK utilizzando l’indentazione di spazi vuoti nella struttura COMMAND_LINE_ARGUMENTS. Ciò consente l’esecuzione di codice arbitrario su dispositivi vulnerabili all’insaputa dell’utente.

Quando una vittima apre un file di questo tipo, viene eseguito un comando PowerShell che decodifica ed estrae il contenuto dell’archivio TAR, visualizzando contemporaneamente all’utente un PDF escamotage. L’archivio contiene un’utility legittima Canon Printer Assistant, una DLL dannosa chiamata CanonStager e un payload malware PlugX crittografato (cnmplog.dat), distribuito tramite sideload DLL.

PlugX (noto anche come Destroy RAT, Kaba, Korplug, SOGU e TIGERPLUG) è un trojan di accesso remoto che offre agli hacker il controllo completo su un sistema infetto. Il malware può eseguire comandi, intercettare le sequenze di tasti, caricare e scaricare file, persistere nel sistema modificando il registro di Windows ed effettuare ricognizioni approfondite.

L’architettura modulare di PlugX consente ai suoi operatori di espandere le funzionalità del trojan tramite plugin progettati per attività specifiche. Il malware utilizza anche tecniche di anti-analisi e anti-debug per complicare l’analisi e passare inosservato.

Secondo i ricercatori di Arctic Wolf, è stata documentata un’evoluzione nel toolkit degli aggressori: le dimensioni degli artefatti CanonStager si sono ridotte da 700 KB a 4 KB, a indicare uno sviluppo attivo e la riduzione al minimo della loro impronta digitale. Inoltre, si segnala che all’inizio di settembre il gruppo ha iniziato a utilizzare file HTML Application (HTA) per caricare codice JavaScript che recupera i payload dal sottodominio cloudfront[.]net.

Vale la pena notare che il problema CVE-2025-9491 esiste almeno dal 2017 ed è stato attivamente sfruttato da numerosi gruppi di hacker. Lo sfruttamento di questo bug è stato segnalato pubblicamente per la prima volta nel marzo 2025. All’epoca, gli analisti di Trend Micro scoprirono che la vulnerabilità era ampiamente sfruttata da undici gruppi di hacker “governativi” e altri criminali informatici, tra cui Evil Corp, APT43 (Kimsuky), Bitter, APT37, Mustang Panda, SideWinder, RedHotel e Konni.

Tuttavia, nonostante lo sfruttamento diffuso, gli sviluppatori Microsoft non hanno ancora rilasciato una patch per il CVE-2025-9491. A marzo, i rappresentanti dell’azienda hanno dichiarato che avrebbero “considerato la possibilità di risolvere il problema”, ma hanno sottolineato che la vulnerabilità non richiedeva un’attenzione immediata. Microsoft ha inoltre sottolineato che Defender dispone di strumenti di rilevamento per bloccare tale attività e che Smart App Control fornisce una protezione aggiuntiva.

Poiché non esiste ancora una patch ufficiale, Arctic Wolf consiglia di limitare o bloccare l’uso dei file LNK in Windows, di bloccare le connessioni all’infrastruttura di controllo degli hacker scoperta dai ricercatori e di rafforzare il monitoraggio delle attività di rete sospette.

L'articolo Hacker cinesi prendono di mira le agenzie diplomatiche europee (anche l’Italia) proviene da Red Hot Cyber.