Cyber-physical and supply chain attacks keep getting stranger

Hackers triggered automatic defrosting in supermarket fridges across Europe, and a commenter recalls the same thing hitting US military exchanges a month or two ago. Crypto thieves are selling hardware wallets with a hidden eSIM, which is a modem small enough to hide inside the device and leak secrets. The Rust borrow checker turned out to have 11-year-old unsoundness bugs, and a commenter was shocked that the minimal example is so simple and so easy to hit by accident. The research on AI models that can provably hide arbitrary capabilities was read by some as a new way to smuggle a malicious payload that only activates on niche context.

The connecting idea is that the thing you trust is not doing quite what you think. The fridge controller, the wallet, the compiler and the model all have behavior you did not inspect.

Some pushback: commenters argue the Rust finding is a compiler bug rather than a design flaw, and others note that a fridge defrost attack is more nuisance than catastrophe.