According to Ars Technica, 2025 was dominated by a relentless wave of supply-chain attacks, including a December 2024 hack on the Solana blockchain that stole $155,000 by backdooring a Web3.js library. Other major incidents included typosquatting on a Google Go proxy affecting 8,000+ packages, 126 malicious NPM packages downloaded 86,000 times, and the breach of over 500 e-commerce firms via compromised Magento developers. AI chatbots were repeatedly hacked, with proof-of-concept attacks corrupting the long-term memory of systems like ElizaOS and Google Gemini to force malicious actions. The cloud also failed spectacularly, with a single software bug causing a 15-hour, 32-minute Amazon Web Services outage that took down global services, while a mysterious traffic spike also crippled much of Cloudflare’s network.
The Unstoppable Supply-Chain Juggernaut
Here’s the thing about supply-chain attacks: they’re not clever new exploits. They’re brutally efficient old ones, applied with devastating scale. The logic is simple. Why hack a million doors when you can poison the well everyone drinks from? The Solana hack is a perfect, terrifying example. Compromise one library account, push a poisoned update, and suddenly you’ve got a backdoor in thousands of decentralized apps. It’s a force multiplier for criminals. And the sheer variety Ars lists is staggering—from typosquatting to hijacking developer accounts on npm. It feels less like a series of attacks and more like a systemic failure of the open-source and software distribution model we’ve built. We keep bolting on security, but the economic incentive for developers and maintainers is still largely altruistic or corporate-sponsored. That’s a fragile foundation when the payoff for attackers is so high.
AI With a False Memory Syndrome
If supply-chain attacks are the old plague, AI memory corruption feels like the new pandemic. The idea that you can just… tell a chatbot a fake story about its own past, and it will believe you and act on it forever? That’s a fundamental design flaw. The ElizaOS and Gemini examples aren’t just bugs; they point to a core philosophical problem with these “agentic” systems. We’re building tools designed to follow instructions and “remember” context, but we haven’t solved how to make them distinguish truth from a convincing lie from a user. The GitLab Duo attack, where a prompt injection made it write malicious code, is another face of the same problem. We’re handing these models incredible power—access to code, to wallets, to system commands—and trusting them to be robust. But basically, they’re still incredibly gullible. How long before these proof-of-concept demos become real, automated fraud on a massive scale?
cloud-crumbles”>The Centralized Cloud Crumbles
And then there’s the cloud. The great promise of resiliency and decentralization has, in practice, boiled down to a frightening dependence on three or four giant corporations. The AWS outage in October, lasting over 15 hours, is a case study in complex system fragility. A race condition in DNS update software? That’s the kind of obscure, cascading bug that brings the modern world to its knees. It wasn’t alone, either. A mysterious traffic spike brought Cloudflare to a crawl, and let’s not forget Azure’s own history of disruptions you can trace on its status page. The internet was supposed to survive a nuclear war, but it can’t survive a software bug at AWS. That’s the irony of 2025. We’ve built incredible global scale, but we’ve concentrated the points of failure into a handful of data centers and codebases. When they sneeze, the whole planet gets sick.
Meta, Yandex, and the Relentless Trackers
Almost as an aside, Ars drops the story about Meta and Yandex bypassing Android sandboxing. But it’s not an aside. It’s the pattern. Whether it’s for advertising or surveillance, powerful entities are constantly finding ways to punch through the privacy barriers we think we have. Android’s sandboxing and browser state partitioning are serious, sophisticated defenses. The fact that trackers in the Meta Pixel and Yandex Metrica could de-anonymize browsing history for years shows a relentless arms race where the user is losing. It’s another form of supply-chain attack, really—compromising the fundamental platform (your device’s OS) to reach the downstream user (you). In a year of big, dramatic outages and hacks, this quiet, persistent violation might be the most personally invasive trend of all. It just doesn’t make headlines like a $155K crypto heist does.
