Firmware hacking used to be state-actor territory. Now it’s a hobby project. A security researcher used Opus 5 to own his peripherals: “Network-connected devices seem near universally fucked at this point? … The next few years are going to be extremely interesting.” (Chaz Schlarp)
- A security researcher used Claude Opus 5 to reverse engineer five peripherals over two weeks of evenings, ending up with a webcam whose activity LED can be silently disabled while recording, a microphone whose mute LED can lie about its status, and a WiFi light that allows arbitrary memory writes over a single HTTP POST.
- All five devices took 13 hours of mostly unattended AI work and 98 prompts total, collapsing what was once considered state-actor-level firmware exploitation into a hobby project.
- The post closes with a genuinely uncomfortable observation: a self-replicating worm already has the hardware in hand, and AI just handled the labor barrier that was keeping firmware implants out of reach.
