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.
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 Currency can be withdrawn and replaced.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
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?
Stable coins are spreading like wildfire in Asia. It’s poised to overtake even the US is terms of spending. People use it to send money back home and ledgers MITM attack happened in Asia.
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
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.
Maybe it increases the price quite a lot, IDK.
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...
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.
It was also the decision of the customers to still buy a Ledger device despite being breached multiple times.
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 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
I'll just order my crucible and tongs off Alibaba.
Wait a second...
(I agree in general, I'm just exploring the statement).
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.
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.
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.
These industries are just not sexy enough for the crypto folks to want to learn from, or about.
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?
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)
I never did get one, though.