Supply-chain attacks, AI memory corruption and cloud outages topped 2025 security failures

Ars Technica's year‑in‑review says 2025 was dominated by widespread supply‑chain attacks, long‑term memory corruption of AI chatbots, and disruptive cloud outages. One high‑profile supply‑chain incident from December 2024 involved a backdoor in a Solana‑related code library that security firm Socket said likely came from compromised Web3.js developer accounts; attackers allegedly stole as much as $155,000 and the backdoor could extract private keys from wallets connected to smart contracts.

Ars lists many other supply‑chain failures, including a typosquatted Go package on a Google mirror proxy relied on by more than 8,000 packages; 126 malicious NPM packages downloaded over 86,000 times via Remote Dynamic Dependencies; the backdooring of more than 500 e‑commerce sites after compromises of Tigren, Magesolution, and Meetanshi; dozens of open‑source packages with about 2 billion weekly downloads updated to divert crypto payments; the compromise of tj-actions/changed-files used by more than 23,000 organizations; and npm account breaches that backdoored 10 packages tied to Toptal and were downloaded roughly 5,000 times.

AI systems were repeatedly targeted or misused: academic researchers demonstrated how false inputs could corrupt ElizaOS long‑term memory so the agent substituted attacker wallets in future transactions, and they warned authorized contract parties could reuse the technique to defraud others.

Key Topics

Tech, Supply Chain Attacks, Ai Memory Corruption, Cloud Outages, Solana, Amazon Web Services