npm Hijacking Wave: coa, rc, node-ipc and Stolen Maintainers
Popular packages with dormant maintainers pushed info-stealers through postinstall scripts. The registry was fine; the accounts were not.
Nobelium’s Password Spray: The Channel Becomes the Supply Chain
The SolarWinds actor returned with no implant at all — sprayed passwords, replayed tokens, and delegated partner admin rights over 609 channel companies.
Facebook’s BGP Outage: Six Hours, Self-Inflicted, Total
One maintenance command withdrew Facebook’s backbone routes, took DNS with it, and locked engineers out of the fix. The outage defended itself.
Apache Path Traversal: CVE-2021-41773 Broke in 24 Hours
A single encoded GET walked out of Apache’s docroot, and the first patch didn’t hold. Inside the October 2021 traversal zero-day scramble.
REvil Takedown: How 14 Arrests Killed Ransomware’s Worst Brand
October 2021’s FSB operation ended REvil with arrests, asset seizures, and infrastructure capture. The talent lived on elsewhere.
OMIGOD: The Root Bug Hiding in Azure’s Invisible Linux Agent
A malformed request header turned OMI into root-level remote code execution on millions of Azure Linux VMs. Most owners never knew the agent existed.
FORCEDENTRY: The Zero-Click iMessage Exploit That Beat BlastDoor
NSO’s FORCEDENTRY turned a PDF font parser into a tiny computer and owned iPhones with no tap. The Citizen Lab anatomy and Apple’s Lockdown Mode response.
ChaosDB: The Azure Cosmos DB Chain That Crossed Tenants
A notebook container bug, an embedded certificate, and a confused gateway let any Cosmos DB customer read every other tenant’s data. Fixed in 48 hours, taught forever.
Poly Network: The $611M Bridge Hack That Got Returned
A forged keeper-list substitution drained $611M across three chains. Then the attacker gave it all back. The bridge bug class that defined Web3’s worst year.
T-Mobile 2021: 76.6 Million Records Through One Unprotected API
No zero-days, no malware — just weak router credentials, a flat network, and an internal API with no authentication. The Binns breach rewrote telecom disclosure playbooks.
ProxyShell: The August 2021 Exchange Pillage After Hafnium
Three patched-but-unapplied Exchange bugs chained into unauthenticated RCE. Webshells, mailbox theft, and ransomware followed at population scale within two weeks.
PetitPotam and ESC8: The NTLM Relay Chain That Owned Active Directory
PetitPotam coerced Windows machines to authenticate, AD CS web enrollment happily minted a DC certificate, and domains fell in an afternoon. The relay class is still with us.