Holy shit... A random Chinese company purchased CryptoBilis (the authorised Ledger reseller that issued the spy-implanted Ledgers) from its Malaysian ex-owner, then put him under a confidentiality agreement preventing him from disclosing the sale publicly. What a wild attack.

OK, a physical implant seems to be the leading possibility, and I think Mark's October 8 post warning about this might have caused the attacker to begin the drain today. This would pass the Ledger Live "Genuine Check" since the actual board and secure element are real, and Ledger can't detect spying implants. You wouldn't need a crazy secure element exploit for this. And cellular closes the exfiltration route question (Mark showed that these spy-implanted Ledgers have SIM cards in them with active data plans) So the attackers are sitting there farming freshly generated seeds, waiting for the right moment to strike (if you start draining, everyone gets alerted). Probably a good moment to strike is when a post about physically modified Ledgers with SIM cards in them gets 75,000 views... Many things still up in the air, but I'd bet on this being the vector: a specific vendor selling Ledgers with physical spy implants, bypassing the Genuine Check, spying on seeds, and doing a mass drain after seeing Mark's warning getting traction.

The post that I think caused the drain timing. Of course this would have saved people by money, by making the "hack" happen sooner rather than later.

Really brutal. The phishing email is written quite convincingly, and it comes from the official Trezor domain. At least tens of millions will be lost; hopefully not hundreds of millions. Insane f*ckup from Trezor.

I don't like Coldcard either, but NVK didn't orchestrate this. For an inside job, you'd want to use a firmware RNG (like Dual EC DRBG where the NSA backdoored their RNG while shilling it as safe), or more generally, have the device generate the entropy in a way that only the attacker knows (rather than the general public knowing how to crack it, with the code being fully open) In this case the RNG was just broken (and publicly so), not actually backdoored If I'm a malicious HWW maker, I'd do something like the device comes (silently) pre-initialised with a seed, and the first time you generate a seed, it always uses the first seed (and then later it generates a new one), and you just make it look like a bug. As the attacker, you'd know how all the pre-init seeds are, and if someone finds it (highly unlikely) you just claim it's a bug Bear in mind that even with open source stuff like CC, you can have the bug in preinstalled firmware (the never used state straight out of the factory), and the subsequent firmware doesn't have it, so the bug would never even need to enter the open source firmware. I'd just have that in the firmware that's flashed onto the device, and come up with some legit justification that there's a different firmware that's flashed at the factory. Free backdoor, 100% plausible deniability, and extremely hard for anyone to find out. There's no practical way to export the firmware that's preloaded on the device. Or if you were going to mess up the entropy like Coldcard actually did (but intentionally, as a backdoor), you'd use way more entropy, so that it's theoretically exploitable but super hard to exploit. And then as your retirement plan you'd have a huge GPU cluster to crack them. As opposed to being able to crack them in twenty minutes like what happened here. So yeah, can confirm this was not an inside job, the inside job narrative logically makes no sense. It's really just a (bad) coincidence that NVK kept talking about retirement attacks; this wasn't one of them.