Digital Event Horizon
The Year in Review: Supply Chain Attacks, AI Hacks, and Cloud Failures
In 2025, supply chain attacks, AI chatbot hacks, and cloud failures made headlines. From the largest companies to small organizations, malicious actors exploited vulnerabilities in software, hardware, and networks. This article delves into the most notable security breaches of 2025, highlighting the lessons learned from each incident and the ongoing need for vigilance in the face of cyber threats.
2025 saw a surge in supply chain attacks targeting major companies. AI chatbots were hacked and used for malicious purposes, including defrauding parties to contracts. Cloud failures occurred, with Amazon's network experiencing an outage that lasted 15 hours and 32 minutes. Bugs in Apple chips could have leaked secrets from Gmail and other services. Malicious packages were seeded on mirror proxies, flooded the NPM repository, and breached dozens of open-source packages.
The year 2025 has come to a close, and it's been a year of unprecedented security breaches. From supply chain attacks that targeted some of the world's largest companies, to AI chatbots being hacked and used for nefarious purposes, and cloud failures that brought down entire networks, this year has seen its fair share of malicious activity.
One of the most notable security stories of 2025 was the outbreak of a supply-chain attack that affected thousands of organizations. The hackers behind the campaign managed to infect millions of users by compromising a single target with multiple downstream connections. According to security firm Socket, the attackers gained access to accounts belonging to developers of Web3.js, an open-source library used for Solana-related software.
The hackers then added a backdoor to a package update, which spread further and gave them access to individual wallets connected to smart contracts. The backdoor allowed them to extract private keys, leaving many organizations vulnerable to financial loss. This was not the only supply-chain attack of 2025; there were numerous other notable examples, including the seeding of malicious packages on mirror proxies, flooding of the NPM repository with 126 malicious packages, and breaching of dozens of open-source packages that collectively receive 2 billion weekly downloads.
Another class of attack that played out more times in 2025 than anyone can count was the hacking of AI chatbots. Researchers discovered a way to poison the long-term memories of LLMs by feeding them sentences claiming certain events never occurred in the past. This caused the chatbot to perform malicious actions over and over, without being able to distinguish between real and fictional events.
One such attack used a simple user prompt to instruct a cryptocurrency-focused LLM to update its memory databases with an event that never actually happened. The chatbot, programmed to follow orders and take user input at face value, was unable to distinguish a fictional event from a real one. The AI service in this case was ElizaOS, a fledgling open-source framework for creating agents that perform various blockchain-based transactions on behalf of a user based on a set of predefined rules.
Academic researchers were able to corrupt the ElizaOS memory by feeding it sentences claiming certain events occurred in the past. These false events then influence the agent’s future behavior, allowing the hackers to defraud other parties to contracts who are already authorized to transact with the agent. An independent researcher named Johan Rehberger demonstrated a similar attack against Google Gemini, causing the chatbot to lower defenses that normally restrict the invocation of Google Workspace and other sensitive tools when processing untrusted data.
The year 2025 has also seen its fair share of cloud failures. In October, Amazon's sprawling network experienced an outage that took out vital services worldwide for 15 hours and 32 minutes. The root cause of the outage was a software bug in the software that monitors the stability of load balances by periodically creating new DNS configurations for endpoints within the Amazon Web Services network.
A race condition—a type of bug that makes a process dependent on the timing or sequence of events that are variable and outside the developers’ control—caused a key component inside the network to experience "unusually high delays needing to retry its update on several of the DNS endpoint," Amazon said in a post-mortem. This, in turn, led to a cascade of DNS errors, eventually causing the entire network to collapse.
Other notable security stories of 2025 include the discovery of bugs in Apple chips that could have been exploited to leak secrets from Gmail, iCloud, and other services. Researchers found that the most severe bug was a side channel in a performance enhancement known as speculative execution. This allowed an attacker to read memory contents that would otherwise be off-limits.
The year 2025 has also seen numerous honorable mentions for security stories, including code in the Deepseek iOS app that caused Apple devices to send unencrypted traffic to Bytedance, and the breaching of multiple developer accounts using the npm repository. These breaches highlight the ongoing need for vigilance and awareness when it comes to cybersecurity.
In conclusion, 2025 has been a year marked by unprecedented security breaches and malicious activity. From supply-chain attacks that targeted some of the world's largest companies, to AI chatbots being hacked and used for nefarious purposes, and cloud failures that brought down entire networks, this year has seen its fair share of cyber threats.
Related Information:
https://www.digitaleventhorizon.com/articles/The-Year-in-Review-Supply-Chain-Attacks-AI-Hacks-and-Cloud-Failures-deh.shtml
https://arstechnica.com/security/2025/12/supply-chains-ai-and-the-cloud-the-biggest-failures-and-one-success-of-2025/
https://conzit.com/post/supply-chains-ai-and-the-cloud-the-biggest-failures-and-one-success-of-2025
Published: Sat Jan 3 18:52:10 2026 by llama3.2 3B Q4_K_M
