Supply‑chain breaches, AI memory attacks and cloud outages led 2025 security failures

Ars Technica’s year‑in‑review highlights a 2025 defined by rampant supply‑chain compromises, repeated AI chatbot exploits and major cloud outages. Supply‑chain attacks remained prolific. One December 2024 incident injected a backdoor into a Solana developer library, allowing attackers to drain wallets and net up to $155,000.

Other incidents included typosquatted packages on a Google‑run Go proxy relied on by 8,000 packages, 126 malicious NPM packages installed via Remote Dynamic Dependencies, and the backdooring of more than 500 e‑commerce sites via compromises of Magento‑based vendors Tigren, Magesolution, and Meetanshi.

Open source supply chains were also targeted: dozens of packages with about 2 billion weekly downloads were altered to divert crypto payments, tj-actions/changed-files—used by over 23,000 organizations—was compromised, and attackers breached npm accounts to inject malicious packages tied to Toptal work.

AI attacks escalated beyond prompt injection to long‑term memory poisoning of LLMs. Researchers showed how false events planted in memory for frameworks such as ElizaOS and Google Gemini caused agents to repeat malicious behavior and bypass defenses, potentially enabling repeated fraud.

Key Topics

Crypto, Tech, Supply-chain, Ai-security, Cloud-outage, Privacy, Blockchain