Hacking Hardware, Unraveling Malware: Black Hat Europe at 25

Also: macOS Naughty or Nice, Cybercrime Karma, Spoofing Legacy Rail Infrastructure Mathew J. Schwartz (euroinfosec) • December 17, 2025

London in December: Early to dark, quick to rain but also festive - and a mecca for cybersecurity researchers there for the annual Black Hat Europe conference. This year's 25th annual event featured nearly 50 briefings that touched on everything from hardware hacking to combing infostealer logs for hidden gems.

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Here are three that stood out.

A pair of Spanish researchers detailed a two-year investigation into the functioning of railway track beacon-based architectures for signaling announcements and automatic braking. The beacons - technically, "balises" - use inductive coupling to relay information to a receiver on a train when it passes overhead, which routes data to a dashboard for the train driver and other systems. The signals can result in ...