È stata scoperta una grande botnet chiamata RondoDox che sfrutta 56 vulnerabilità in più di 30 dispositivi diversi, tra cui bug dimostrati per la prima volta durante la competizione di hacking Pwn2Own.

Gli aggressori prendono di mira un’ampia gamma di dispositivi accessibili tramite Internet, tra cui videoregistratori digitali (DVR), videoregistratori di rete (NVR), sistemi di videosorveglianza e server web.

RondoDox utilizza una strategia che i ricercatori di Trend Micro chiamano “exploit shotgun”: il malware utilizza più exploit contemporaneamente per massimizzare il numero di infezioni, nonostante la natura di alto profilo di tale attività.

I ricercatori segnalano che, tra le altre vulnerabilità, RondoDox attacca CVE-2023-1389, un bug nel router Wi-Fi TP-Link Archer AX21, inizialmente dimostrato al Pwn2Own Toronto 2022. Si sottolinea che gli sviluppatori della botnet monitorano attentamente gli exploit dimostrati al Pwn2Own e poi iniziano a utilizzarli nella pratica.

Tra le vulnerabilità n-day che RondoDox ha già aggiunto al suo arsenale ci sono:

• Digiever – CVE-2023-52163;
• Qnap – CVE-2023-47565;
• LB-LINK – CVE-2023-26801;
• TRENDnet – CVE-2023-51833;
• D-Link – CVE-2024-10914;
• TBK – CVE-2024-3721;
• Netgear – CVE-2024-12847;
• AVTECH – CVE-2024-7029;
• TOTOLINK – CVE-2024-1781;
• Tenda – CVE-2025-7414;
• TOTOLINK – CVE-2025-1829;
• Meteobridge – CVE-2025-4008;
• Edimax – CVE-2025-22905;
• Linksys – CVE-2025-34037;
• TOTOLINK – CVE-2025-5504;
• TP-Link – CVE-2023-1389.

Gli esperti scrivono che le vecchie vulnerabilità, soprattutto nei dispositivi che hanno superato il periodo di supporto, rappresentano un problema serio, poiché è meno probabile che ricevano patch. I problemi più recenti nell’hardware supportato non sono meno pericolosi, poiché molti utenti semplicemente ignorano gli aggiornamenti del firmware dopo la configurazione iniziale del dispositivo.

Gli analisti di Trend Micro segnalano che RondoDox utilizza exploit per 18 vulnerabilità di command injection a cui non è ancora stato assegnato un identificatore CVE. Queste vulnerabilità interessano i dispositivi NAS D-Link, i DVR TVT e LILIN, i router Fiberhome, ASMAX e Linksys, le telecamere Brickcom e altri dispositivi non specificati.

Come precedentemente riportato da FortiGuard Labs, RondoDox è in grado di lanciare attacchi DDoS utilizzando HTTP, UDP e TCP. Per evitare di essere rilevata, la botnet maschera il suo traffico dannoso sotto forma di giochi e piattaforme popolari, tra cui Minecraft, Dark and Darker, Roblox, DayZ, Fortnite e GTA di Valve, oltre a strumenti come Discord, OpenVPN, WireGuard e RakNet.

Per proteggersi dagli attacchi RondoDox, i ricercatori raccomandano di installare gli ultimi aggiornamenti firmware disponibili e di sostituire tempestivamente l’hardware scaduto. Inoltre, si raccomanda di segmentare la rete, isolando i dati critici dai dispositivi IoT accessibili tramite Internet e dalle connessioni guest, nonché di modificare le credenziali predefinite e utilizzare password complesse.

L'articolo Scoperta la botnet RondoDox: migliaia di dispositivi a rischio proviene da il blog della sicurezza informatica.

In this video our hacker [Inkbox] shows us how to create a computer game that runs directly on computer hardware, without an operating system!

[Inkbox] briefly explains what BIOS is, then covers how UEFI replaces it. He talks about the genesis of UEFI from Intel in the late 90s. After Intel’s implementation of UEFI was made open source it got picked up by the TianoCore community who make tools such as the TianoCore EDK II.

[Inkbox] explains that the UEFI implementation provides boot services and runtime services. Boot services include things such as loading memory management facilities or running other UEFI applications, and runtime services include things like system clock access and system reset. In addition to these services there are many more UEFI protocols that are available.

[Inkbox] tells us that when an x64 CPU boots it jumps to memory address 0xfffffff0 that contains the initialization instructions which will enter protected mode, verify the firmware, initialize the memory, load the storage and graphics drivers, then run the UEFI Boot Manager. The UEFI Boot Manager will in turn load the appropriate EFI application, such as the firmware settings manager application (the “BIOS settings”), Windows Boot Manager, or GRUB. In this video we make our very own EFI application that the UEFI Boot Manager can be configured to load and run.

The system used for development and testing has a AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 CPU and 32GB DDR5 RAM.

Having explained how everything gets started [Inkbox] goes on to explain how to write and deploy the assembly language program which will load and play the game. [Inkbox] shows how to read and write to the console and mentions that he did his testing on QEMU with an image on an external USB thumbdrive. He goes on to show how to use the system time and date facilities to get the current month. When trying to read nanoseconds from the system clock he ended up needing to refer to the UEFI Specification Release 2.10 (2.11 is latest as of this writing).

In the rest of the video [Inkbox] does some arithmetic for timing, uses LocateProtocol to load the graphics output provider, configures an appropriate video mode, writes to the screen using BLT operations, and makes the program run on multiple CPU cores (the CPU used has 24). At last, with some simple graphics programming and mouse input, [Inkbox] manages to get Space Game for x86 to run.

If you’re interested in knowing more about UEFI a good place to start is What’s The Deal With UEFI?

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Researchers call it “hallucination”; you might more accurately refer to it as confabulation, hornswaggle, hogwash, or just plain BS. Anyone who has used an LLM has encountered it; some people seem to find it behind every prompt, while others dismiss it as an occasional annoyance, but nobody claims it doesn’t happen. A recent paper by researchers at OpenAI (PDF) tries to drill down a bit deeper into just why that happens, and if anything can be done.

Spoiler alert: not really. Not unless we completely re-think the way we’re training these models, anyway. The analogy used in the conclusion is to an undergraduate in an exam room. Every right answer is going to get a point, but wrong answers aren’t penalized– so why the heck not guess? You might not pass an exam that way going in blind, but if you have studied (i.e., sucked up the entire internet without permission for training data) then you might get a few extra points. For an LLM’s training, like a student’s final grade, every point scored on the exam is a good point.

The problem is that if you reward “I don’t know” in training, you may eventually produce a degenerate model that responds to every prompt with “IDK”. Technically, that’s true– the model is a stochastic mechanism; it doesn’t “know” anything. It’s also completely useless. Unlike some other studies, however, the authors do not conclude that so-called hallucinations are an inevitable result of the stochastic nature of LLMs.

While that may be true, they point out it’s only the case for “base models”– pure LLMs. If you wrap the LLM with a “dumb” program able to parse information into a calculator, for example, suddenly the blasted thing can pretend to count. (That’s how undergrads do it these days, too.) You can also provide the LLM with a cheat-sheet of facts to reference instead of hallucinating; it sounds like what’s being proposed is a hybrid between an LLM and the sort of expert system you used to use Wolfram Alpha to access. (A combo we’ve covered before.)

In that case, however, some skeptics might wonder why bother with the LLM at all, if the knowledge in the expert system is “good enough.” (Having seen one AI boom before, we can say with the judgement of history that the knowledge in an expert system isn’t good enough often enough to make many viable products.)

Unfortunately, that “easy” solution runs back into the issue of grading: if you want your model to do well on the scoreboards and beat ChatGPT or DeepSeek at popular benchmarks, there’s a certain amount of “teaching to the test” involved, and a model that occasionally makes stuff up will apparently do better on the benchmarks than one that refuses to guess. The obvious solution, as the authors propose, is changing the benchmarks.

If you’re interested in AI (and who isn’t, these days?), the paper makes an interesting, read. Interesting if, perhaps disheartening if you were hoping the LLMs would graduate from their eternal internship any time soon.

Via ComputerWorld, by way of whereisyouredat.

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Anyone who has ever snapped a chain or a crank knows how much torque a bicycle’s power train has to absorb on a daily basis; it’s really more than one might naively expect. For that reason, [Well Done Tips]’s idea of 3D printing a gear chain from PLA did not seem like the most promising of hacks to us.

Contrary to expectations, though, it actually worked; at the end of the video (at about 13:25), he’s on camera going 20 km/h, which while not speedy, is faster than we thought the fixed gearing would hold up. The gears themselves, as you can see, are simple spurs, and were modeled in Fusion360 using a handy auto-magical gear tool. The idler gears are held in place by a steel bar he welded to the frame, and are rolling on good old-fashioned skateboard bearings–two each. (Steel ones, not 3D printed bearings.) The healthy width of the spur gears probably goes a long way to explaining how this contraption is able to survive the test ride.

The drive gear at the wheel is steel-reinforced by part of the donor bike’s cassette, as [Well Done Tips] recognized that the shallow splines on the freewheel hub were not exactly an ideal fit for PLA. He does complain of a squeaking noise during the test ride, and we can’t help but wonder if switching to helical gears might help with that. That or perhaps a bit of lubricant, as he’s currently riding the gears dry. (Given that he, too, expected them to break the moment his foot hit the pedal, we can’t hardly blame him not wanting to bother with grease.)

We’ve seen studies suggesting PLA might not be the best choice of plastic for this application; if this wasn’t just a fun hack for a YouTube video, we’d expect nylon would be his best bet. Even then, it’d still be a hack, not a reliable form of transportation. Good thing this isn’t reliable-transportation-a-day!

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Press freedom wins in Chicago court, but fight continues

Chicago journalists won a big First Amendment victory Oct. 9, when a federal court temporarily curbed federal officers’ abuses at protests. But the fight isn’t over.

The order still allows officers to potentially remove journalists along with protesters, a serious threat to press freedom that must be fixed.

We also can’t rely on courts alone. Local officials must step up, especially to protect independent journalists, who’ve been the main targets of these violations.

That’s why Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) led a coalition letter urging the Broadview, Illinois, Police Department and Illinois State Police to investigate attacks on independent journalists covering protests.

Read more about the order here.

Strengthen presidential library transparency

A segment on “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver” about corruption and secrecy surrounding presidential libraries cited FPF’s Lauren Harper, who has been warning about Trump’s purported library since before his inauguration.

Oliver is right. Secret donations to presidential libraries enable bribery, while public access to presidential records is at an all-time low. Use our action center tool to tell Congress to close the secrecy loopholes and increase transparency.

Write to your lawmakers here.

Army lawyer thinks journalists are stenographers

The Pentagon attempted to walk back its policy restricting reporters from publishing news the government doesn’t authorize. But the revised policy is still a nonstarter to which no journalist should agree.

Meanwhile, a nominee for general counsel for the Department of the Army, Charles L. Young III, effectively endorsed the unconstitutional restrictions during a Senate hearing this week, opining that the First Amendment authorizes the government to punish journalists for publishing information that it did not approve for public release.

That’s disqualifying. A journalist’s job isn’t to keep the government’s secrets. It’s to report news the government does not want reported.

Tell Congress to reject Young’s nomination.

State Department must stand up for journalists detained on flotillas

Israel continues to hold American journalists captured in international waters aboard aid flotillas. The latest are Jewish Currents reporter Emily Wilder and Drop Site News reporter Noa Avishag Schnall. Previously, Israel detained Drop Site News reporter Alex Colston, who has said he and other detainees were abused and denied medical care.

But the State Department is doing little if anything about these detainments, presumably because the journalists in question don’t agree with the administration’s policies. Lawmakers need to raise their voices and pressure the administration to do more.

Write to your member of Congress here.

Student journalists fight Trump’s anti-speech deportations

It’s not every day a student newspaper takes on the federal government. But that’s exactly what The Stanford Daily is doing.

The Daily sued Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem in August over the Trump administration’s push to deport foreign students for exercising free speech, like writing op-eds and attending protests.

We spoke at the start of Stanford University’s fall term with Editor-in-Chief Greta Reich about why the Daily is fighting back. Read more here.

It’s time to end the SEC gag rule

We’ve written before about the unconstitutionality of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s “gag rule,” which bars those who settle with the SEC from talking to reporters, to protect the SEC’s reputation.

We shouldn’t need to say this, but the government doesn’t get to censor its critics to make itself look good. Last week, we filed a legal brief explaining to a federal appellate court why the ridiculous rule must be struck down. Read the brief here.

What we’re reading

ICE goes masked for a single reason (The New York Times). FPF’s Adam Rose tells the Times that immigration officers “seem to feel they can just willy-nilly shoot tear gas canisters at people and shoot them with foam rounds that can permanently maim people.”

The New York Times wins right to obtain info Musk wanted kept private (The New Republic). A court ruled that the public’s interest in knowing if Elon Musk has a security clearance and access to classified information outweighs any potential privacy interests.

Press Freedom Partnership newsletter (The Washington Post). “Journalists who are considering covering the story are going to think twice about it and stay home because they don’t want to be jailed and shot. It’s a major problem,” we told the Post about law enforcement targeting journalists covering anti-deportation protests in and around Chicago.

Journalism has become more challenging, for reporters and sources (Sentient). Sources have backed out of news stories — even seemingly uncontroversial ones — out of fear of being targeted by the Trump administration.

MAGA slams ‘fake news’ but embraces ‘The Benny Show’s’ misinformation (Straight Arrow News). “Plenty of past presidents would have loved to exclude serious journalists … and bring in the Benny Johnsons of their time. They just were under the impression that the public wouldn’t tolerate that,” we told Straight Arrow News. Now it’s up to the public to prove those past presidents right and the current one wrong.

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A federal judge just reminded the government that the First Amendment still applies in Chicago.

On Oct. 9, Chicago journalists and protesters scored a major legal win, when Judge Sara Ellis issued a temporary restraining order reigning in federal officers’ repeated First Amendment violations at protests.

It’s a big victory for press freedom. The order prohibits arrests and use of physical force against journalists and restricts the use of dangerous crowd-control munitions. It defines “journalists” broadly, in a way that includes independent, freelance, and student reporters. It also enhances transparency by requiring federal officers to wear “visible identification,” like a unique serial number.

This order and similar rulings in Los Angeles last month are powerful reminders that journalists working together can vindicate their rights in the courts. They also highlight the crucial role that independent journalists and smaller news organizations play in defending press freedom. In both Chicago and Los Angeles, it’s been freelancers, community news outlets, local press clubs, and unions who’ve taken the lead, teaming up with protesters, legal observers, and clergy to take the government to court.

Unconstitutional dispersals of press still possible

But the fight isn’t over. The Chicago order unfortunately leaves open the possibility that, at least in some instances, federal officers may order journalists to leave areas where protests are being broken up or officers are attacking protesters.

Although the order prohibits dispersal of journalists from protests as a general matter, it also states that officers can “order” journalists to “change location to avoid disrupting law enforcement,” as long as they have “an objectively reasonable time to comply and an objectively reasonable opportunity to report and observe.” (In contrast, a similar order in Los Angeles states only that federal officers may “ask” journalists to change location.)

Federal officers are likely to use this as a loophole to continue to violently remove the press from protests, on the pretext that it’s necessary to avoid disruption. The order’s requirement that press must be able to continue to report and observe is also too lax; far better would have been an order specifically requiring that press be able to continue to see and hear the protest and law enforcement response.

Even when police can disperse protesters who break the law, the First Amendment doesn’t allow them to disperse journalists, too.

The weaker language around dispersals of journalists in the court’s order is a shame, especially for the public’s right to know. In recent days, Chicago journalists have been reporting about the violent tactics used by federal agents to disperse protests. If journalists can be ordered to leave alongside protesters, they can’t observe what’s happening or capture the images they need to keep the public informed.

It also makes dispersals more dangerous for protesters. As Unraveled Press noted, “Again and again, we’ve seen cops are most likely to get more violent with demonstrators when out of public view.” (Unraveled Press co-founder Raven Geary is a plaintiff in the Chicago lawsuit.) And while the court’s order prohibits dispersal orders aimed at peaceful protesters, if federal officers violate that order and also disperse the press to avoid a “disruption,” it will be much harder for the public to learn about it.

By declining to simply prohibit federal officers from dispersing the press, except when necessary to serve an essential government need such as public safety, the court also got the law wrong. Even when police can disperse protesters who break the law, the First Amendment doesn’t allow them to disperse journalists, too.

We’re not the only ones who say so. Just last year, the Department of Justice issued guidance stating as much:

“In the case of mass demonstrations, there may be situations—such as dispersal orders or curfews—where the police may reasonably limit public access. In these circumstances, to ensure that these limitations are narrowly tailored, the police may need to exempt reporters from these restrictions. …”

The DOJ also said so in a previous report, reprimanding the Minneapolis Police Department for its suppression of protesters and the press following George Floyd’s murder:

“The First Amendment requires that any restrictions on when, where, and how reporters gather information ‘leave open ample alternative channels’ for gathering the news. Blanket enforcement of dispersal orders and curfews against press violates this principle because they foreclose the press from reporting about what happens after the dispersal or curfew is issued, including how police enforce those orders.”

And in an important decision from 2020, the federal court of appeals in the 9th Circuit also disapproved of blanket dispersal orders being enforced against the press. That case arose from very similar circumstances to those today: federal authorities abusing the First Amendment while policing federal property during Black Lives Matter protests in Portland, Oregon.

In the 2020 case, the 9th Circuit affirmed a legal order that exempted journalists from general dispersal orders issued by the federal government. Journalists, it wrote, “cannot be punished for the violent acts of others.”

These authorities make it clear: Journalists cannot be ordered to move simply because it would be more convenient for officers. Journalists can only be dispersed if it’s essential to a compelling government interest, and only if they continue to have another vantage point from which they can see and hear what’s going on in order to report.

It’s frustrating that the court’s order leaves the door open for the government to evade this well-established principle. But the fight isn’t over. The court’s temporary restraining order is just a first step. When it issues a more permanent ruling, it will have another opportunity to get the prohibition on dispersing the press right.

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The European Pirate Party is proud to officially endorse the European Citizens’ Initiative for Psychedelic Assisted Therapy, a campaign calling on the European Commission to support research, access, and responsible regulation of psychedelic-assisted therapy.

Mental health remains one of the most pressing public health challenges of our time. Across Europe, millions of people are struggling with depression, PTSD, anxiety disorders and other mental health conditions. Traditional treatment options do not work for everyone — which is why new, evidence-based approaches are urgently needed.

Psychedelic-assisted therapy has shown strong clinical potential in recent research, but legal barriers, outdated stigma, and lack of harmonized EU policies continue to block progress. This ECI aims to change that by calling for a European strategy to support scientific research, training, and safe access to these therapies under medical supervision.

“This is an important opportunity for the EU to take mental health seriously and to base its decisions on science rather than outdated fear. Psychedelic-assisted therapy offers real hope to many people for whom existing treatments are not enough. Supporting research and responsible regulation is not just sensible policy — it’s a matter of human dignity.”
— Florian Roussel, Chair of the European Pirate Party

The European Pirates stand firmly for evidence-based policy, personal autonomy, and human rights. We believe mental health policy should be guided by scientific evidence and respect for individual choice, not by stigma or fear.

This European Citizens’ Initiative is a unique democratic tool that allows citizens to place issues directly on the EU agenda — but it needs one million signatures to succeed.

Sign the initiative today and help us push the EU toward a modern, rational, and compassionate approach to mental health care. Every signature counts.

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