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chain of custody

Exploiting the flaw requires local access to the equipment or the systems handling its output, not a remote internet-based attack. That significantly narrows the realistic threat model: this is not something an outside attacker could do to a random crime lab over the internet. But 'local access' in a forensic context is not a high bar. Lab technicians, contractors, cleaning and maintenance staff, and anyone with physical proximity to the equipment across the roughly thirty years this class of system has been in use represents a large population, and chain-of-custody protocols in forensic science exist precisely because insider access has always been the harder problem to rule out.

• The vulnerability had reportedly existed for decades without being identified, suggesting standard security auditing had not been applied to specialised forensic equipment at the same intensity as mainstream enterprise software.
• AI-assisted vulnerability research lowers the cost of finding this class of flaw, meaning similarly overlooked forensic and medical equipment may harbour comparable issues nobody has looked for yet.
• Thermo Fisher's equipment is used broadly enough across crime labs that a single flaw touches an unusually large share of stored forensic evidence nationally.
• The finding arrives amid the same week's broader concerns about AI-assisted security research being used offensively, giving this instance an unusually direct defensive counter-example.