When people talk about “cyber risk,” they almost always mean the software they can see: web apps, cloud servers, endpoint agents. But in every connected product – from the car that just pulled into your driveway to the access point on your desk – there’s a deeper layer few people look at. That layer decides how the device actually starts, authenticates, and runs. That layer is firmware. The layer nobody audits.
I have inspected firmware from routers, EV chargers, infotainment systems, and medical devices. Every time the pattern repeats: code gets compiled, flashed, and then – for years – forgotten. No visibility. No traceability. No assurance.
A vendor might say “we scanned the release” – but those scans are often superficial checks at the filesystem level. They rarely verify what actually executes across a fleet of deployed devices.
The result is devices shipped with legacy components, outdated runtime pieces, or behavior nobody in the organization can confidently explain. Firmware becomes a blind spot by design and default.
Also Read: Why ECU Tuning Could Be the Weakest Link in Automotive Cybersecurity
What Firmware Visibility Actually Means
Visibility isn’t just a list of files. It’s the ability to answer higher-order questions such as:
- Which components inside the device still rely on legacy or unmaintained code?
- Which images share identical binary components across multiple product lines?
- Which shipped images differ from the vendor’s claimed release in material ways?
Put simply: visibility is about knowing what’s inside and being able to measure change over time – not about showing step-by-step techniques or giving away exploit paths.
Firmware Visibility: Why This Matters Now
The firmware attack surface is real and growing.
- Routers & Gateways: Persistent implants have been observed living on devices long after reboots or factory resets.
- Automotive ECUs: Interfaces originally intended for servicing and diagnostics can be abused when the underlying firmware state is unknown.
- Cameras & DVRs: Large botnets were built from devices containing hard-coded or forgotten credentials and long-unpatched components.
- Enterprise appliances: Many appliances in production still carry aged runtime components because their firmware lifecycles weren’t tracked.
These are not hypothetical risks – they are operating realities. Once shipped, firmware is often treated as if it were hardware: opaque and outside standard software controls.
The Practical Consequences
- Supply-chain blind spots: OEMs often integrate third-party modules that are pre-flashed and not fully validated. Hidden components ride into millions of devices with the integrator unaware.
- Incident response gaps: During investigations, teams struggle to determine whether persistence or compromise lives in surface software or deeper device firmware. The lack of clarity forces blunt containment actions and expensive replacements.
- Regulatory risk: Emerging regimes expect demonstrable firmware assurance. If you can’t prove what’s inside an image, meeting compliance obligations becomes difficult.
- Operational overhead: Without reliable, versioned visibility, each firmware release requires heavy manual validation – slowing updates and increasing time-to-fix.
Also Read: ECU Security: Inside the Reverse-Engineer’s Mind – How ECUs Are Hacked
How We Ended Up Here
Firmware historically lived as a monolith, produced by separate engineering groups, third-party suppliers, or legacy toolchains. Security tooling evolved around networks and cloud services, not embedded images.
That made sense when devices were offline or isolated. It makes no sense in a world where everything is networked. We built connected systems on top of unverified codebases. That’s the invisible perimeter the industry keeps ignoring.
The Update That Didn’t Actually Remove Risk
A networking vendor released what looked like a patch. Superficially, the update changed the image manifest and rolled out to devices.
But a subsequent inspection of the delivered image showed the risky component remained present – only dormant under common settings. The vendor believed the issue was resolved; the device fleet still carried the risk.
The Forgotten Component in a Vehicle
A vehicle’s firmware contained multiple partitions compiled at different times. One older partition included a long-running, unaddressed component that was not part of the regular patch workflow.
Because it was embedded and out of sight of normal update pipelines, it escaped routine fixes – leaving a persistent exposure in the field.
The Appliance with Inherited Risk
An enterprise appliance vendor integrated third-party modules. Those modules included upstream components that had been abandoned. The vendor’s QA validated functionality but not the provenance and updateability of each embedded artifact. Years later, an incident traced back to that inherited component.
These examples are not technical playbooks – they are evidence of systemic failures in lifecycle management and supply-chain rigor.
Visibility as a Control Plane
Think of visibility as a continuous control plane: a capability that tells you what’s running, how it changed, and where risk accumulates. It’s the difference between reacting to incidents and managing them proactively.
This isn’t a single scan or checklist. It’s a persistent capability that informs decisions: when to update, when to quarantine, and when a device must be replaced. Without that control plane, organizations are flying blind.
What Observability Unlocks
- When firmware is observable at scale, organizations can:
- Prioritize the genuinely risky items instead of chasing noise,
- Correlate device risk with supply-chain provenance and vendor practices,
- Produce verifiable artifacts for audits and regulators, and
- Reduce costly, blanket remediation campaigns by focusing on real exposures.
These are operational outcomes – not a description of technical steps – and they are what separate a mature device security program from an ad-hoc one.
The Road Ahead
Embedded systems are the next practical battleground for security. Billions of devices run code that is rarely audited, hard to patch, and frequently delivered by third parties.
The industry must shift from treating firmware like immutable hardware to treating it as a part of the software supply chain that must be tracked, measured, and governed. If we don’t do that, we’ll continue to discover the same classes of compromises: invisible, persistent, and costly.
