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A malicious SIM card can order the device it sits in to run commands of the attacker's choosing. On the cellular modules built into electric-vehicle chargers, industrial routers, and car telematics units, that is enough to take the whole device over. Researchers at the University of Birmingham and the security firm Fuzzware tested 26 phones and cellular modules for the capability, found it switched on in 9 of them, and used it to run their own code on a commercial EV charger. Six of the eight cellular modules they tested accepted the command. Only 3 of 18 phones did: the OPPO Find X5, the OPPO Reno 14 F 5G, and the ASUS Zenfone 9. No iPhone or Pixel was among them. The exposure is in machine-to-machine hardware. Five of the six were Quectel parts, three of them pulled from an EV charger, an industrial router, and a car's telematics control unit. Knowing the victim's number is not enough: every attack starts with a hostile card already in the slot, swapped by hand,...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a "factory-shipped backdoor" implanted in at least 20 Chinese router models from Zbtlink. According to a new report from VulnCheck, the implant appears in all 21 firmware images currently available from Zbtlink that span more than 2 years. The backdoors are designed such that they start automatically and attempt to beacon to Chinese command-and-control (C2) infrastructure as often as every 35 seconds. They masquerade as a Linux kernel thread, but are actually userland processes running with root privileges while blending their true functionality with other legitimate kworker processes. The "phone home" implants have been codenamed ENDLESSDOORS . "ENDLESSDOORS, at its core, is a small tool called rctl (remote control linux)," Jacob Baines, VulnCheck Chief Technology Officer, said. "Uploaded to GitHub on January 14, 2015 and never touched again, this obscure repository implements a simple co...

Researchers at firmware security firm Binarly have found six new flaws in U-Boot, the small program that starts up hardware as varied as home routers, smart cameras, and the management chips inside data-center servers. Four of the bugs can crash a device. The other two could let an attacker who slips a malicious image in front of the bootloader run their own code, before the device has confirmed that the software is genuine. That last part is the point. A bootloader runs before the operating system, so a flaw here can undermine everything that loads after it. All six bugs are reached while U-Boot is still reading an untrusted image, before it has checked the signature. What Binarly found U-Boot can bundle a kernel, device tree, ramdisk, and other boot components into one package, a FIT (Flattened Image Tree), and it checks that package's digital signature before handing over control. Binarly went looking for weak spots in that check and found six. Most of the vulner...

Researchers at Ledger's Donjon security team  have shown that a precisely timed laser pulse, aimed at the chip inside a Tangem crypto wallet card, can reset the card's password to anything the attacker picks. No old password. No backup card. Once it is reset, whoever did it controls the wallet and can move the coins out. This is not an emergency for most owners. The attack needs the physical card in hand and a lab that Donjon puts at around $250,000. It also means cutting the card open, which leaves damage no one can miss. It cannot be done over the internet, and there is no fix coming: Tangem cards cannot take software updates, so every card already sold carries the flaw. The one group that should act now is anyone whose card is lost or stolen and holds serious value. How the card is meant to protect you A Tangem wallet looks like a plain bank card. Tap it to your phone, and a companion app talks to a Samsung S3D232A chip inside. That chip is a ...