Attack the Glass (ATG)

Supply Chain Injection Vulnerabilities on Client-Side Rendering

This is about deception. It is about how people can be tricked, manipulated, and misled by the screens they trust most: the phone in their hand, the laptop on their desk, the display they work from every day. It is about a cybersecurity vulnerability that gives an attacker control over what your screen shows and what it does. The attacker can change the information in front of you. The attacker can add things that were never there. The attacker can take away what you needed to see: the warning, the fee, the alternative, the button that would have let you say no. A great many of the decisions we make each day rest on information shown to us on a screen, and the same screen often captures the decision and sets the action in motion: the payment is sent, the order is placed, the valve is opened. Whoever controls the screen can influence what people believe, the opinions they form, the decisions they make, and the actions they take. This is disinformation in its most direct form: a false experience, on a screen you had every reason to believe.

We call this cybersecurity vulnerability Attack the Glass (ATG). It exploits a weakness in our existing cybersecurity architecture through a supply chain injection on client-side rendering. Most of the screens around us are dynamic, created in the instant before they are shown to you. What appears is often shaped by who you are, where you are, what you are doing, why and when you are doing it, and even how you are interacting with the system. That real-time assembly of the user interface is accomplished using client-side rendering. The various companies and individuals that provide the data, media, components, code, and other assets are part of the vast, global internet supply chain. Anyone who controls one of those assets can quietly change what your screen shows and what it does, and every security tool in use today will report that all is well. An attacker can aim the change at everyone, at one group, or at one person, which makes the deception more persuasive and leaves almost nobody in a position to notice. Artificial intelligence can now write a different deception for every one of those people, in seconds, at almost no cost. The change happens in the memory of the device and is gone when the screen goes dark, so an attack that could not be detected while it ran cannot be proven afterward.

TLP:CLEAR

May be shared without restriction.

Free information about the Attack the Glass (ATG) Vulnerability

This is self-funded research, under way since 2022. It is published to raise awareness in industry, in government, and among researchers of a significant threat of deception, disinformation, manipulation, and adversarial influence.

A key aspect of our work is securing all types of supply chains, from physical to digital to financial to cyber. It was through this work, combined with decades of international security experience, that we discovered the ATG vulnerability. We do not have a solution for ATG, and we are not selling one.

ATG is an endemic vulnerability. Solving it will take many technology platforms, governments, and industries working together.

Everything here is marked TLP:CLEAR and licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. Share it, quote it, and build on it, with credit to nDiligence.

About the ATG Research

ATG was found by people who work on internet supply chains, and they paid for the research themselves. That work produced tools that help with part of the problem. None of it means ATG is solved.

Where ATG came from

Robert Beckett discovered the ATG vulnerability in 2022, and then led more than four years of research, testing, and documentation. It was all internal and self-funded. No government, vendor, platform, or investor funded the work, directed it, or approved what we published. For two years before publication we briefed governments, academics, and industry experts on ATG and gave them the opportunity to review and test the work. We notified each of them in advance of our intent to publish, as responsible disclosure requires. You can check how it was done and verify it yourself.

Who we are

Our founders and team have researched and worked on internet supply chain problems for almost twenty years. In March 2026 we created nDiligence to take on the larger problem the ATG research kept leading back to: diligence, vetting, and monitoring of supply chains. Helping organizations build and monitor their digital supply chains is one of its core missions.

The tools the research produced

The research needed tools that did not exist, so we built them, along with research processes, data collection platforms, analytic functions, and methodologies. We had to capture the HTTP and other network communications of software platforms, web-based and mobile applications in particular, and those tools evolved into SCVue. SCVue helps you discover your digital dependencies, which is where diligence on those third-party organizations begins. It has a free community edition, and an affordable paid edition that covers hosting, storage, data enrichment, development, support, and operating costs.

ATG is not solved

None of these tools solves ATG. They are designed to support research, diligence, vetting, and monitoring. ATG is an endemic vulnerability in client-side rendering, and in other runtime environments that lack detection and security controls for these threats, with no single owner and no single patch. Doing all of this is what makes us experts, and that matters. The experts are telling you this is an important problem, and that we need to work together to solve it.