Ledger confirms unauthorized hardware implant; losses may exceed $86M

JUST IN: Ledger confirms an unauthorized hardware implant, with losses potentially exceeding $86 million, in an incident it says appears isolated to a single reseller in its Southeast Asian market.

Someone physically bugged a hardware wallet, and the losses may top eighty six million dollars.

Ledger confirmed it on Sunday. One of the affected users' devices contained an unauthorized hardware implant, a chip that shouldn't be there, in a machine people buy precisely so nobody can touch their crypto. The investigator Specter puts the damage above eighty six million across Bitcoin, Ethereum and Tron.

Ledger says it looks isolated to one reseller, CryptoBilis, which was listed as an authorized seller in Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines and has now frozen all hardware wallet sales. Ledger insists its own systems weren't compromised. The advice is blunt, if you bought from that reseller, don't set the device up, and if you already have, move everything to a fresh seed right now.

The entire pitch of a hardware wallet is trust the box. Someone just proved the box can lie before you've even opened it.

This is Sara White, reporting for HIT.