Smash-and-Grab Extortion

The article reviews industry reporting that a large share of widely exploited vulnerabilities in 2023–2024 were zero-days, highlights the difficulty of patching and maintaining IoT firmware composed of many third-party components, and warns of high-impact outcomes (including physical destruction of OT equipment). It argues that traditional patch-centric defenses are insufficient for resource-constrained MCUs and advocates hardware-enforced isolated partitioning (pmode/umode partitioning and portals for Cortex‑M MCUs) as a practical mitigation to limit the blast radius of compromises.