I just opened a ledger up, its stupid easy to do. Why wouldn't they make this a sealed unit with and glue it to make it impossible to open without damaging? Also why would you not glue the entire circuit board? The entire board is covered in test pads which make it super easy to solder dodgy stuff onto.
At the price of an eSIM and a LTE modem (and of the stolen 100$M), destroying a glued casing and making your own costs next to nothing. Looking at the photos, even without the test pads soldering directly on the components seem pretty easy.
Sony SRF-39FP has a transparent case, designed to thwart contraband concealment. The radio often appears on the commissary lists of U.S. federal prisons, hence the "FP" suffix
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SRF-39
Sony D-FJ003FP, Sony WM-FX193FP, SONY SRF-M35FP
how can the implant send the seed words to an attacker? doesn't a crypto wallet have to talk an application on the host computer? wouldn't the communication between the wallet and the host computer never allow for the seed words to be sent from the wallet to the outside world? in other words how could an "implant" tampering of the wallet make the host computer suddenly start sending seed phrases to third parties?
They were almost certainly not doing the OCR on the device. Such a CPU would be too power-hungry and the process would still be too error-prone given the limited compute. They would just send the raw data to the C2, which could send it to an emulator, snapshot the output and send it to an LLM.
Though it's not what happened in this case, you could tamper with a crypto wallet to make it emulate a USB keyboard and once connected, send a series of keystrokes to download and run an exploit.
All hw wallets are being breached. Big, easy target. I think a lot of people are interested in this breach and the people behind it. 100 million worth? This might works both ways.. curious about the further investigations. My hunch… after major crackdowns on scam centers in the golden triangle, this is their latest dab to wealth?
Ledger the company was not breached (this time around). The devices here were modified by a middleman in the distribution chain and sold to unsuspecting buyers.
From what I read, an official reseller was breached. It was the decision of Ledger to use that reseller in the first place and to not do a check on their distribution chain. They could have sold straight to the customer instead.
You need to have reseller in most countries otherwise your customers will have to deal with long shipping time, customs, etc. The same for selling in physical stores.
It was the decision of Ledger to use a reseller and to increase their attack vector just so the customer wouldn't be inconvenienced with three more days of shipping. Bad decision in my opinion.
It was also the decision of the customers to still buy a Ledger device despite being breached multiple times.
The crypto lunatic fringe have long frustrated me with their assertions of sovereign this and that.
There is no sovereignty in crypto if YOU ARE NOT BUILDING YOUR OWN HARDWARE.
Any claims of sanctity or reliability in the software stack are rendered null and void until someone with a tunneling electron microscope has completed an audit of your chips.
THIS is why Taiwan matters so much, people: there is NO sovereignty for as long as your chips are being imported. You can trust all you want - but trust is nothing without verification. We are all serf-subjects of the wafer-producing overlords.
Ledger clearly drank the koolaid. Crypto people: invest in hardware. NOT software. Anything less is utter futility.
You can be the multi yourself. Choose diverse hardware (ie, not all the same Ledger) and your likelihood of compromise changes significantly in your favor.
Sure, loss of seed material would be catastrophic so have a backup scheme. The point isn’t that you can make it perfect, but there’s laughably risky and imperfect solutions and putting everything on a single key HW device like this is the poster child.
Not sure what you mean? Taiwan, imported, isnt taiwan the biggest exporter of high end chips? 100% these have not been hacked in Taiwan. You mean setting up your own fab? I am confused
Because it works... The level of counterfeit currency is readily measurable. Currency can be withdrawn and replaced. Individual stolen notes can be tracked. Counterfeiting of the dollar and the euro today is a relatively minor problem
It's very very very very hard to forge money convincingly enough to fool central banks. It's basically impossible for anyone but nation-state actors, and the only known cases date back decades. Today, it's even harder, because even if central banks were unable to identify forgeries, duplicate serial numbers or ones that have never been issued would be detected very quickly.
Even making forgeries that can fool normal automated tests, like those done in an ATM, is incredibly hard. It's certainly possible, just way too expensive.
You sound sarcastic but it's true. Unless you have government-level resources, you can't make a perfect $20 bill. They don't use paper--water would destroy it--they use a special fabric with a single supplier that only sells to the government. They don't print; they stamp. There are watermarks, security strips, and other features that can't easily be reproduced. Doing it right would be a massive investment, at the risk of being caught and losing everything.
It's very hard to steal a lot of physical currency.. Even with the biggest bills, it becomes unmanageable. Digitally it obviously doesn't matter if your transferring 1 Bitcoin or 10K
The idea of a hardware wallet sounded wronged to me from the start.
Why would you trust some random hardware, that has the sole purpose of holding your money, making it an obvious target, over a general purpose computer you control entirely?
Strictly speaking, a hardware wallet doesn't hold your "money". Your assets live on the blockchain, and your seed phrase generates the private keys that control them.
The hardware wallet is just an interface between you, your seed, and the blockchain.
In other words: as long as you have your seed phrase (and your passphrase, if you set one) on a piece of paper, you can smash your hardware wallet to bits and be fine.
(This assumes a standard single-signature wallet using the BIP-39 standard)
If there was ever any appeal to me, it’s that vague notion that machines get wiped, rebuilt, compromised, travel, get stolen, etc. A dedicated device could kinda avoid some of that if it mostly sits in a safe or something.
I just opened a ledger up, its stupid easy to do. Why wouldn't they make this a sealed unit with and glue it to make it impossible to open without damaging? Also why would you not glue the entire circuit board? The entire board is covered in test pads which make it super easy to solder dodgy stuff onto.
At the price of an eSIM and a LTE modem (and of the stolen 100$M), destroying a glued casing and making your own costs next to nothing. Looking at the photos, even without the test pads soldering directly on the components seem pretty easy.
I believe epoxy-filling them a-la IronKey is a good idea, but for longevity reasons, I'd prefer the rechargeable battery to be replaceable.
Maybe it increases the price quite a lot, IDK.
Depending on who is responsible for this, do you not think these people would have the ability to circumvent physical anti-tampering measures?
Not an excuse for ledger making a sub-par product to begin with...
why not make it transparent?
Sony SRF-39FP has a transparent case, designed to thwart contraband concealment. The radio often appears on the commissary lists of U.S. federal prisons, hence the "FP" suffix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SRF-39 Sony D-FJ003FP, Sony WM-FX193FP, SONY SRF-M35FP
Shouldn't it be possible to track who bought the esim, where the data is sent, and who owns the wallets where the stolen crypto is transferred?
It's easy to buy eSIMs anonymously. Either directly with cryptocurrency, or with a prepaid virtual credit card bought with cryptocurrency.
They tracked the traffic (not the eSIMs) to some servers in Hong Kong, managed by Alibaba.
how can the implant send the seed words to an attacker? doesn't a crypto wallet have to talk an application on the host computer? wouldn't the communication between the wallet and the host computer never allow for the seed words to be sent from the wallet to the outside world? in other words how could an "implant" tampering of the wallet make the host computer suddenly start sending seed phrases to third parties?
They sniffed the LCD interface and OCR'ed the seed words when they were displayed using an implanted tiny CPU. This is a very sophisticated attack.
They were almost certainly not doing the OCR on the device. Such a CPU would be too power-hungry and the process would still be too error-prone given the limited compute. They would just send the raw data to the C2, which could send it to an emulator, snapshot the output and send it to an LLM.
Well it doesn't need to be a generic purpose OCR, just one that works for this single UI layout and font.
i don't think OCRing a bitmap font is very expensive or power hungry, if you know the exact pixel configurations of the glyphs ahead of time
Exactly. No O, just CR.
The attackers added their own tiny 4G or 5G board.
They put an eSIM in the device…
There is an eSIM with worldwide data in the device.
Though it's not what happened in this case, you could tamper with a crypto wallet to make it emulate a USB keyboard and once connected, send a series of keystrokes to download and run an exploit.
The implant could fabricate a reason to connect to a host computer. Like "Cannot display seed words, connect to a computer to debug"
The bigger question is, who is still buying Ledger Crypto Wallets? Wasn't this their fourth breach?
All hw wallets are being breached. Big, easy target. I think a lot of people are interested in this breach and the people behind it. 100 million worth? This might works both ways.. curious about the further investigations. My hunch… after major crackdowns on scam centers in the golden triangle, this is their latest dab to wealth?
Ledger the company was not breached (this time around). The devices here were modified by a middleman in the distribution chain and sold to unsuspecting buyers.
From what I read, an official reseller was breached. It was the decision of Ledger to use that reseller in the first place and to not do a check on their distribution chain. They could have sold straight to the customer instead.
You need to have reseller in most countries otherwise your customers will have to deal with long shipping time, customs, etc. The same for selling in physical stores.
It was the decision of Ledger to use a reseller and to increase their attack vector just so the customer wouldn't be inconvenienced with three more days of shipping. Bad decision in my opinion.
It was also the decision of the customers to still buy a Ledger device despite being breached multiple times.
The crypto lunatic fringe have long frustrated me with their assertions of sovereign this and that.
There is no sovereignty in crypto if YOU ARE NOT BUILDING YOUR OWN HARDWARE.
Any claims of sanctity or reliability in the software stack are rendered null and void until someone with a tunneling electron microscope has completed an audit of your chips.
THIS is why Taiwan matters so much, people: there is NO sovereignty for as long as your chips are being imported. You can trust all you want - but trust is nothing without verification. We are all serf-subjects of the wafer-producing overlords.
Ledger clearly drank the koolaid. Crypto people: invest in hardware. NOT software. Anything less is utter futility.
not your keys, not your crypto
not your hardware, not your keys
not your chips, not your hardware
not manufactured in house, not your chips
not your designs, not manufactured by you
not designed by you personally, not your designs
ad infinitum. To be truly secure, you must first learn to survive alone in the wilderness and smelt tin
... and smelt tin
I'll just order my crucible and tongs off Alibaba.
Wait a second...
Our grandparents stored their crypto under their matresses.
This is why the assertion that crypto allows you and you alone to control your capital is a fallacy. Depends on your threat model of course...
Yes, that is true.
big bang or bust.
ah the good old C-x M-c M-smelting
Every cryptographic system has a trust assumption somewhere
Hm. Computation with paper and pencil?
(I agree in general, I'm just exploring the statement).
Unless you are a world-class cryptographer, you have to trust someone that the algorithms are sound.
Crypto people keep rediscovering we live in a society.
Seems like maybe crypto having a single point of failure (keys) is a problem rather than hardware.
You will never be completely secure against failure, the only way to protect yourself is to be able to robustly recover from failure.
I'd rather be able to say "every single government is in my hardware and they still can't touch it."
Perhaps possible with multisig, but now you're basically back to trusting banks.
Keys don’t have to be a SPoF though. Multi-signature schemes are the baseline for security today.
Right, but who is the multi in the multisig and what happens if they die.
You can be the multi yourself. Choose diverse hardware (ie, not all the same Ledger) and your likelihood of compromise changes significantly in your favor.
Sure, loss of seed material would be catastrophic so have a backup scheme. The point isn’t that you can make it perfect, but there’s laughably risky and imperfect solutions and putting everything on a single key HW device like this is the poster child.
Not sure what you mean? Taiwan, imported, isnt taiwan the biggest exporter of high end chips? 100% these have not been hacked in Taiwan. You mean setting up your own fab? I am confused
Yes, Taiwan is the biggest exporter of chips. Have you audited your chips today?
I wonder if even people like Intel or AMD or Nvidia do.
There might be a strict hardware audit process for cryptographic accelerators on IBM Z machines though, I'm not sure, I'm gonna ask though.
It is standard practice in many industries to do hardware audits, including random controls of chip supplies.
These industries are just not sexy enough for the crypto folks to want to learn from, or about.
Every bitcoin in existence will eventually be hacked. It's just a matter of time.
Yet we trust our daily money system to be based on printed colorful paper that no one can reproduce.
Because it works... The level of counterfeit currency is readily measurable. Currency can be withdrawn and replaced. Individual stolen notes can be tracked. Counterfeiting of the dollar and the euro today is a relatively minor problem
https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/pr/date/2025/html/ecb.pr2502... https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/statistics/banknote https://www.cranecurrency.com/news-insights/85-decline-in-us...
Doesn't matter as long as the real money is not disappearing from my wallet
It's very very very very hard to forge money convincingly enough to fool central banks. It's basically impossible for anyone but nation-state actors, and the only known cases date back decades. Today, it's even harder, because even if central banks were unable to identify forgeries, duplicate serial numbers or ones that have never been issued would be detected very quickly.
Even making forgeries that can fool normal automated tests, like those done in an ATM, is incredibly hard. It's certainly possible, just way too expensive.
You sound sarcastic but it's true. Unless you have government-level resources, you can't make a perfect $20 bill. They don't use paper--water would destroy it--they use a special fabric with a single supplier that only sells to the government. They don't print; they stamp. There are watermarks, security strips, and other features that can't easily be reproduced. Doing it right would be a massive investment, at the risk of being caught and losing everything.
It's very hard to steal a lot of physical currency.. Even with the biggest bills, it becomes unmanageable. Digitally it obviously doesn't matter if your transferring 1 Bitcoin or 10K
Some chollima, its always a chollima.
The idea of a hardware wallet sounded wronged to me from the start.
Why would you trust some random hardware, that has the sole purpose of holding your money, making it an obvious target, over a general purpose computer you control entirely?
Strictly speaking, a hardware wallet doesn't hold your "money". Your assets live on the blockchain, and your seed phrase generates the private keys that control them.
The hardware wallet is just an interface between you, your seed, and the blockchain.
In other words: as long as you have your seed phrase (and your passphrase, if you set one) on a piece of paper, you can smash your hardware wallet to bits and be fine.
(This assumes a standard single-signature wallet using the BIP-39 standard)
If there was ever any appeal to me, it’s that vague notion that machines get wiped, rebuilt, compromised, travel, get stolen, etc. A dedicated device could kinda avoid some of that if it mostly sits in a safe or something.
I never did get one, though.
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