Ledger Hardware Supply Chain Attack May Have Been Exposed Before Large-Scale Wallet Fund Transfers, Former Mt. Gox CEO Mark Karpelès Had Issued a Warning

Odaily News — According to monitoring by Bitcoin News, former Mt. Gox CEO Mark Karpelès may have inadvertently triggered a coordinated transfer of funds across multiple wallets after publicly disclosing physical tampering with Ledger devices equipped with hidden surveillance implants. On October 8, Karpelès warned that counterfeit or tampered Ledger devices with hidden SIM cards were being sold on the market, and these SIM cards were capable of transmitting stolen seed phrases. The implants were reportedly able to intercept data sent to the device screen, thereby capturing the recovery phrases displayed to users during wallet setup. Such devices could allegedly still pass Ledger's official genuine product verification, because the original secure element remained intact and the verification process was unable to detect unauthorized physical modifications. One emerging speculation is that attackers collected seed phrases from affected devices and waited to simultaneously transfer funds from multiple wallets. Karpelès's warning reportedly received approximately 90,000 views, which may have made the attackers aware that their operation had been exposed and prompted them to move the stolen funds. Karpelès stated that one affected Ledger device he examined came from Malaysia, was packaged in intact shrink wrap, and had an implant hidden beneath the screen. The suspected attack path is currently a compromised hardware supply chain rather than a vulnerability in cryptographic algorithms. The connection between Karpelès's warning and the subsequent wallet fund transfers has not yet been confirmed, nor has it been verified whether the same batch of implants was responsible. If the relevant circumstances are confirmed, the incident would demonstrate that even if a device is certified by the manufacturer, compromised hardware can still undermine users' self-custody security.