Mark Karpelès, CEO of Tokyo-based Karpelès Lab, said the spy implant found in Ledger hardware wallets sold by Southeast Asian reseller CryptoBilis has also turned up in devices from two more authorized Ledger resellers, and that its newest version is built for mass production.
Karpelès said on Unchained’s Oct. 15 livestream that one of those devices was a Ledger Flex bought from Metapod, a reseller with stores at Singapore’s Changi Airport. He said the implant was customized for the Flex, but “it’s still the same kind of board and the same process of having three chips.” He said one chip reads the screen, one is a cellular modem and one is an eSIM that sends the data.
The other, he said, was a Nano X bought at MediaMarkt in Germany by X user Johannes, who Karpelès said sent one unit to him and one to Ledger. Karpelès said “the one sent to me arrived today” and that he found an implant inside, installed a little differently from the Southeast Asian units. “It’s surely the same implant,” he said.
Karpelès first reported the Flex on X on Oct. 13. Johannes shared photos of his MediaMarkt unit on Oct. 11, and Karpelès posted his own MediaMarkt result earlier on Oct. 15.
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What Ledger Has Said
Ledger has said every confirmed drain from the Oct. 9 wave involves CryptoBilis devices. MediaMarkt Saturn halted Ledger sales on Oct. 13 “with Ledger’s alignment,” and Ledger asked sellers in seven Asian markets, including Singapore, to pause sales.
Ledger said in an Oct. 14 post that its team inspected devices from retail and distributor stock in Germany, including the stores named, and “none showed any sign of tampering.” It added, “We have not yet been able to examine the devices shown online.” Johannes replied that the store’s other units appeared to be clean.
Karpelès said he “wouldn’t be able to say for sure” whether Johannes found MediaMarkt’s only tampered units.
‘Made for Mass Production’
In Karpelès’s telling, the implant has gone from a board wired into the device to blank boards that clip in, and on the Nano X “the board will basically just fall into place.” “They spent months of research and development building this,” he said, citing “a lot of funding” behind it.
Implants like this were once costly and narrowly targeted, Karpelès said, but he described the new one as made “for mass production” and said “we’re likely going to see a lot more of it” in the future.
Asked whether Ledger should end its authorized reseller program, Karpelès said that would be “probably too drastic.” He suggested tamper-evident packaging.
Related Listen: The Chopping Block: The Ledger Hardware Implant, a Listening Device at OpenAI, Papertrade’s 1000x House, and the Death of Technical Moats
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