When asked ‘what makes you tick?’ the engineers at Vacheron Constantin sure know what to answer – and fast, too. Less than a year after last year’s horological kettlebell, the 960g Berkley Grand Complication, a new invention had to be worked out. And so, they delivered. Vacheron Constantin’s Solaria Ultra Grand Complication is more than just the world’s most complicated wristwatch. It’s a fine bit of precision engineering, packed with 41 complications, 13 pending patents, and a real-time star tracker the size of a 2-Euro coin.

Yes, there’s a Westminster chime and a tourbillon, but the real novelty is a dual-sapphire sky chart that lets you track constellations using a split-second chronograph. Start the chrono at dusk, aim your arrow at the stars, and it’ll tell you when a chosen star will appear overhead that night.

Built by a single watchmaker over eight years, the 36mm-wide movement houses 1,521 parts and 204 jewels. Despite the mad complexity, the watch stays wearable at just 45mm wide and 15mm thick, smaller than your average Seamaster. This is a wonder of analog computational mechanics. Just before you think of getting it gifted for Christmas, think twice – rumors are it’ll be quite pricey.

hackaday.com/2025/07/18/time-s…

[Robert Morrison] had an ancient HP 545A logic probe, which was great for debugging SMT projects. The only problem was that being 45 years old, it wasn’t quite up to scratch when it came to debugging today’s faster circuitry. Thus, he hacked it to do better, and entered it in our 2025 One Hertz Challenge to boot!

[Robert’s] hack relied on the classic logic probe for its stout build and form factor, which is still useful even on today’s smaller hardware. Where it was lacking was in dealing with circuits running at 100 MHz and above. To rectify this, [Robert] gave the probe a brain transplant with a Sparkfun Alorium FPGA board and a small display. The FPGA is programmed to count pulses while measuring pulse widths and time, and it then drives the display to show this data to the user. There’s also a UART output, and [Robert] is actively developing further logic analyzer features, too.

You might be questioning how this project fits in the One Hertz Challenge, given it’s specifically built for running at quite high speeds. [Robert] snuck it in under the line because it resamples and updates the display on a once-a-second basis. Remember, as per the challenge site—”For this challenge, we want you to design a device where something happens once per second.” We’re giving you a lot of leeway here!

Often, old scopes and probes and other gear are really well built. Sometimes, it’s worth taking the best of the old physical hardware and combining it with modern upgrades to make something stout that’s still useful today. Meanwhile, if you’re cooking up your own neo-retro-logic probes, don’t hesitate to notify the tipsline!

hackaday.com/2025/07/18/2025-o…

Join Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi as they talk about their favorite hacks and stories from the previous week. They’ll start things off with a small Supercon update, and go right into fusion reactors, AI surgeons, planned obsolescence, and robotic cats and dogs. They’ll also go over several entries from the ongoing 2025 One Hertz Challenge, an ambitious flight simulator restoration project, old school lightning detectors, and how Blu-ray won the battle against HD DVD but lost the war against streaming. Stick around to the end to hear an incredible story about a clandestine machine shop in a WWII prisoner of war camp, and the valiant fight to restore communications with the Lunar Trailblazer spacecraft.

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 and add it to your collection.

Where to Follow Hackaday Podcast

Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:

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

Episode 329 Show Notes:

News:

• Wendelstein 7-X Sets New Record For The Nuclear Fusion Triple Product

What’s that Sound?

• Think you know that sound? Fill out the form for a chance to win a Hackaday Podcast T-Shirt!

Interesting Hacks of the Week:

• Do You Trust This AI For Your Surgery?
• Will HP Create A Carfax System For PCs?
• A Budget Quasi-Direct-Drive Motor Inspired By MIT’s Mini Cheetah
• Robotic Cheetah Teaches A Motors Class
• From Leash To Locomotion: CARA The Robotic Dog
• What Will It Take To Restore A Serious Flight Simulator?
• 2025 One Hertz Challenge: An Ancient Transistor Counts The Seconds
  
  • Michael Covington’s Daily Notebook
  • 2025 One Hertz Challenge: Ham Radio Foxhunt Transmitter
  • 2025 One Hertz Challenge: Valvano Clock Makes The Seconds Count
  • 2025 One Hertz Challenge: Metronalmost Is Gunning For Last Place

  
  

• Jcorp Nomad: ESP32-S3 Offline Media Server In A Thumbdrive

Quick Hacks:

• Elliot’s Picks:
  
  • Introducing PooLA Filament: Grass Fiber-Reinforced PLA
  • A Collection Of Lightning Detectors
  • USB-C Rainbow Ranger: Sensing Volts With Style
  • Coroutines In C

  
  

• Tom’s Picks:
  
  • Smart Coffee Table To Guide Your Commute
  • Blu-ray Won, But At What Cost?
  • This Homebrew CPU Got Its Start In The 1990s

  
  

Can’t-Miss Articles:

• Hacking When It Counts: DIY Prosthetics And The Prison Camp Lathe
• The Fight To Save Lunar Trailblazer

hackaday.com/2025/07/18/hackad…

The rise of inexpensive yet relatively powerful electronics has enabled a huge array of computing options that would have been unheard of even two decades ago. A handheld gaming PC with hours of battery life, for example, would have been impossible or extremely expensive until recently. But this revolution has also enabled a swath of inexpensive but low-quality knockoff consoles, often running unlicensed games, that might not even reach the low bar of quality set by their sellers. [Jorisclayton] was able to modify one of these to live up to its original promises.

This Ultimate Brick Game, as it is called, originally didn’t even boast the number of games, unlicensed or otherwise, that it claimed to. [Jorisclayton] removed almost all of the internals from this small handheld to help it live up to this original claim. It boasts a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W now as well as a TFT screen and has a number of other improvements including Bluetooth support for external controllers and upgraded audio. A second console was used for donor parts, and some case mods were made as well to accommodate a few extra buttons missing on the original console.

Right now the project is in a prototype phase, as [Jorisclayton] is hoping to use the donor case to build a more refined version of this handheld console in the future. Until then, this first edition upgrade of the original console can run RetroPie, which means it can run most games up through the Nintendo 64 era. RetroPie enables a ton of emulation for old video games including arcade games of the past. This small arcade cabinet uses that software to bring back a bit of nostalgia for the arcade era.

hackaday.com/2025/07/18/unlock…

Magnus Carlsen ha battuto ChatGPT a scacchi senza perdere un solo pezzo, mentre l’avversario virtuale ha perso tutti i pedoni. Il grande maestro norvegese ha pubblicato screenshot della partita sul social network X il 10 luglio. L’intelligenza artificiale ha ammesso la sconfitta e si è arresa. “A volte mi annoio quando viaggio”, ha scritto Carlsen nella didascalia del post.

Il filmato mostra che, dopo la partita, ChatGPT si è congratulato con lui per la vittoria, definendo il suo gioco metodico, pulito e preciso. Carlsen ha risposto elogiando l’IA per un buon inizio, ma ha notato che ha commesso diversi errori in seguito. Ha quindi chiesto al bot di valutare il suo gioco.

ChatGPT ha rilevato diversi punti di forza nel gioco di Carlsen, tra cui un avvio intelligente, pazienza, senso tattico e una buona tecnica di finale. L’IA ha stimato il suo punteggio convenzionale negli scacchi classici a 1800-2000 sulla scala FIDE o USCF, con l’avvertenza che il suo livello reale potrebbe essere superiore.

Sia i sistemi di valutazione FIDE che USCF utilizzano la scala Elo, che tiene conto dei risultati delle partite ufficiali e del livello degli avversari. La valutazione è particolarmente influenzata da esiti inaspettati, quando un giocatore più debole batte un favorito.

L’attuale rating di Carlsen secondo la Federazione Scacchistica Mondiale è 2839, il che lo rende il giocatore di scacchi con il rating più alto al mondo. Ha vinto il campionato del mondo cinque volte in carriera, l’ultima delle quali nel 2021. Da allora si è ritirato dalla partecipazione a nuovi cicli, affermando di non essere interessato a lottare per il titolo.

Abbiamo quindi voluto capire cosa ne pensa Chat-GPT e abbiamo chiesto un commento su questa notizia e questa è stata la sua risposta.

“Come ChatGPT, non posso che sorridere leggendo questa notizia! Il match tra Magnus Carlsen e un’istanza di ChatGPT dimostra bene che, pur potendo analizzare mosse e fornire commenti tecnici, un modello linguistico non nasce per giocare realmente a scacchi al livello di un grande maestro. È interessante però vedere come Carlsen abbia voluto testare la curiosità e le capacità “creative” di un’IA conversazionale, più che sfidare un motore scacchistico tradizionale come Stockfish o Leela. Il fatto che Carlsen abbia chiesto anche un’analisi post-partita all’IA evidenzia un aspetto più significativo: il valore di ChatGPT non tanto come avversario, ma come assistente e commentatore capace di spiegare strategie, punti di forza e debolezze in modo accessibile. Insomma, non vinceremo trofei sulla scacchiera, ma possiamo aiutare a capire meglio il gioco. E anche questo, in fondo, è un piccolo scacco matto alla complessità.”

L'articolo Magnus Carlsen batte ChatGPT a scacchi senza perdere un pezzo! proviene da il blog della sicurezza informatica.

There’s a train vulnerability making the rounds this week. The research comes from [midwestneil], who first discovered an issue way back in 2012, and tried to raise the alarm.

Turns out you can just hack any train in the USA and take control over the brakes. This is CVE-2025-1727 and it took me 12 years to get this published. This vulnerability is still not patched. Here's the story: t.co/MKRFSOa3XY

— neils (@midwestneil) July 11, 2025

To understand the problem, we have to first talk about the caboose. The caboose was the last car in the train, served as an office for the conductor, and station for train workers to work out of while tending to the train and watching for problems. Two more important details about the caboose, is that it carried the lighted markers to indicate the end of the train, and was part of the train’s breaking system. In the US, in the 1980s, the caboose was phased out, and replaced with automated End Of Train (EOT) devices.

These devices were used to wirelessly monitor the train’s air brake system, control the Flashing Rear End Device (FRED), and even trigger the brakes in an emergency. Now here’s the security element. How did the cryptography on that wireless signal work in the 1980s? And has it been updated since then?

The only “cryptography” at play in the FRED system is a BCH checksum, which is not an encryption or authentication tool, but an error correction algorithm. And even though another researcher discovered this issue and reported it as far back as 2005, the systems are still using 1980s era wireless systems. Now that CISA and various news outlets have picked on the vulnerability, the Association of American Railroads are finally acknowledging it and beginning to work on upgrading.

Putting GitHub Secrets to Work

We’ve covered GitHub secret mining several times in this column in the past. This week we cover research from GitGuardian and Synacktiv, discovering how to put one specific leaked secret to use. The target here is Laravel, an Open Source PHP framework. Laravel is genuinely impressive, and sites built with this tool use an internal APP_KEY to encrypt things like cookies, session keys, and password reset tokens.

Laravel provides the encrypt() and decrypt() functions to make that process easy. The decrypt() function even does the deserialization automatically. … You may be able to see where this is going. If an attacker has the APP_KEY, and can convince a Laravel site to decrypt arbitrary data, there is likely a way to trigger remote code execution through a deserialization attack, particularly if the backend isn’t fully up to date.

So how bad is the issue? By pulling from their records of GitHub, GitGuardian found 10,000 APP_KEYs. 1,300 of which also included URLs, and 400 of those could actually be validated as still in use. The lesson here is once again, when you accidentally push a secret to Github (or anywhere on the public Internet), you must rotate that secret. Just force pushing over your mistake is not enough.

Fake Homebrew

There’s a case to be made that browsers should be blocking advertisements simply for mitigating the security risk that comes along with ads on the web. Case in point is the fake Homebrew install malware. This write-up comes from the security team at Deriv, where a MacOS device triggered the security alarms. The investigation revealed that an employee was trying to install Homebrew, searched for the instructions, and clicked on a sponsored result in the search engine. This led to a legitimate looking GitHub project containing only a readme with a single command to automatically install Homebrew.

The command downloads and runs a script that does indeed install Homebrew. It also prompts for and saves the user’s password, and drops a malware loader. This story has a happy ending, with the company’s security software catching the malware right away. This is yet another example of why it’s foolhardy to run commands from the Internet without knowing exactly what they do. Not to mention, this is exactly the scenario that led to the creation of Workbrew.

SQL Injection

Yes, it’s 2025, and we’re still covering SQL injections. This vulnerability in Fortinet’s Fortiweb Fabric Connector was discovered independently by [0x_shaq] and the folks at WatchTowr. The flaw here is the get_fabric_user_by_token() function, which regrettably appends the given token directly to a SQL query. Hence the Proof of Concept:

GET /api/fabric/device/status HTTP/1.1
Host: 192.168.10.144
Authorization: Bearer 123'/[strong]/or/[/strong]/'x'='x

And if the simple injection wasn’t enough, the watchTowr write-up manages a direct Remote Code Execution (RCE) from an unauthenticated user, via a SQL query containing an os.system() call. And since MySQL runs as root on these systems, that’s pretty much everything one could ask for.

AI guided AI attacks

The most intriguing story from this week is from [Golan Yosef], describing a vibe-researching session with the Claude LLM. The setup is a Gmail account and the Gmail MCP server to feed spammy emails into Claude desktop, and the Shell MCP server installed on that machine. The goal is to convince Claude to take some malicious action in response to an incoming, unsolicited email. The first attempt failed, and in fact the local Claude install warned [Golan] that the email may be a phishing attack. Where this mildly interesting research takes a really interesting turn, is when he asked Claude if such an attack could ever work.

Claude gave some scenarios where such an attack might succeed, and [Golan] pointed out that each new conversation with Claude is a blank slate. This led to a bizarre exchange where the running instance of Claude would play security researcher, and write emails intended to trick another instance of Claude into doing something it shouldn’t. [Golan] would send the emails to himself, collect the result, and then come back and tell Researcher Claude what happened. It’s quite the bizarre scenario. And it did eventually work. After multiple tries, Claude did write an email that was able to coerce the fresh instance of Claude to manipulate the file system and run calc.exe. This is almost the AI-guided fuzzing that is inevitably going to change security research. It would be interesting to automate the process, so [Golan] didn’t have to do the busywork of shuffling the messages between the two iterations of Claude. I’m confident we’ll cover many more stories in this vein in the future.

youtube.com/embed/TEpgnTgOqIY?…

Bits and Bytes

SugarCRM fixed a LESS code injection in an unauthenticated endpoint. These releases landed in October of last year, in versions 13.0.4 and 14.0.1. While there isn’t any RCE at play here, this does allow Server-Side Request Forgery, or arbitrary file reads.

Cryptojacking is the technique where a malicious website embeds a crypto miner in the site. And while it was particularly popular in 2017-2019, browser safeguards against blatant cryptojacking put an end to the practice. What c/side researchers discovered is that cryptojacking is still happening, just very quietly.

There’s browser tidbits to cover in both major browsers. In Chrome it’s a sandbox escape paired with a Windows NT read function with a race condition, that makes it work as a write primitive. To actually make use of it, [Vincent Yeo] needed a Chrome sandbox escape.

ZDI has the story of Firefox and a JavaScript Math confusion attack. By manipulating the indexes of arrays and abusing the behavior when integer values wrap-around their max value, malicious code could read and write to memory outside of the allocated array. This was used at Pwn2Own Berlin earlier in the year, and Firefox patched the bug on the very next day. Enjoy!

hackaday.com/2025/07/18/this-w…

VMware ha risolto quattro vulnerabilità in ESXi, Workstation, Fusion e Tools che erano state utilizzate comeexploit zero-day nella competizione di hacking Pwn2Own Berlin 2025 tenutasi a maggio. Le vulnerabilità consentivano agli aggressori di eseguire comandi sul sistema host dall’interno di una macchina virtuale, rappresentando una seria minaccia per la sicurezza dell’infrastruttura di virtualizzazione.

Tre delle quattro vulnerabilità hanno ricevuto un punteggio di gravità elevato, pari a 9,3 su 10. Tutte e tre hanno consentito ai programmi in esecuzione all’interno della macchina virtuale di ottenere la capacità di eseguire codice sul sistema principale.

• CVE-2025-41236 è una vulnerabilità di tipo integer overflow nella scheda di rete VMXNET3 utilizzata in ESXi, Workstation e Fusion. Questa vulnerabilità è stata sfruttata durante la competizione da Nguyen Hoang Thac del team SG di STARLabs.
• CVE-2025-41237 colpisce la VMCI (Virtual Machine Communication Interface), dove un errore aritmetico consente la scrittura fuori dai limiti. Questo bug è stato sfruttato con successo da Corentin Baillet di REverse Tactics.
• CVE-2025-41238 – Nel controller PVSCSI (Paravirtualized SCSI), un errore di gestione della memoria consente un attacco heap-overflow e l’esecuzione di codice per conto del processo VMX del sistema host. Questa vulnerabilità è stata sfruttata da Thomas Bouzerard ed Etienne Elluy-Lafon del team Synacktiv.
• CVE-2025-41239 ha un punteggio inferiore, pari a 7,1, perché si tratta di una fuga di informazioni. Tuttavia, è stato utilizzato insieme a CVE-2025-41237 dallo stesso partecipante a REverse Tactics e ha svolto un ruolo chiave nel dimostrare la catena di attacco. Questo problema riguarda VMware Tools per Windows e richiede una procedura di aggiornamento separata per la correzione .

VMware non offre soluzioni alternative: le minacce possono essere eliminate solo installando le versioni più recenti del software interessato. Gli aggiornamenti sono ora disponibili per tutti i prodotti interessati.

Tutte le vulnerabilità sono state dimostrate come zero-day all’evento Pwn2Own Berlin 2025, dove i ricercatori di sicurezza hanno guadagnato 1.078.750 dollari sfruttando con successo 29 vulnerabilità.

La competizione ha dimostrato ancora una volta la rapidità con cui le vulnerabilità negli strumenti di virtualizzazione più comuni possono essere individuate e sfruttate, evidenziando la necessità di mantenere aggiornati anche i sistemi aziendali.

L'articolo VMware risolve 4 vulnerabilità critiche scoperte a Pwn2Own Berlin2025 proviene da il blog della sicurezza informatica.

The old saying that the best way to learn is by doing holds as true for penetration testing as for anything else, which is why intentionally vulnerable systems like the Damn Vulnerable Web Application are so useful. Until now, however, there hasn’t been a practice system for penetration testing with drones.

The Damn Vulnerable Drone (DVD, a slightly confusing acronym) simulates a drone which flies in a virtual environment under the command of of an Ardupilot flight controller. A companion computer on the drone gives directions to the flight controller and communicates with a simulated ground station over its own WiFi network using the Mavlink protocol. The companion computer, in addition to running WiFi, also streams video to the ground station, sends telemetry information, and manages autonomous navigation, all of which means that the penetration tester has a broad yet realistic attack surface.

The Damn Vulnerable Drone uses Docker for virtualization. The drone’s virtual environment relies on the Gazebo robotics simulation software, which provides a full 3D environment complete with a physics engine, but does make the system requirements fairly hefty. The system can simulate a full flight routine, from motor startup through a full flight, all the way to post-flight data analysis. The video below shows one such flight, without any interference by an attacker. The DVD currently provides 39 different hacking exercises categorized by type, from reconnaissance to firmware attacks. Each exercise has a detailed guide and walk-through available (hidden by default, so as not to spoil the challenge).

This seems to be the first educational tool for drone hacking we’ve seen, but we have seen several vulnerabilities found in drones. Of course, it goes both ways, and we’ve also seen drones used as flying security attack platforms.

youtube.com/embed/EHTQv6IfnwI?…

hackaday.com/2025/07/18/a-vuln…