An owner of a Ledger Nano S hardware wallet, known by the pseudonym Anchor Drops, reported the theft of at least 10 BTC and raised questions with the device’s manufacturer.
Hey @ledger tonight I lost 10 BTC and ~1.5m of NFTs stored on my ledger Nano S
The ledger was purchased directly from you. The seed phrase was stored in a secure location, never entered anywhere online. I never signed any malicious transactions. Everything is in my physical…
— Anchor Drops (@anchor_drops) December 13, 2024
According to the user, they also lost $1.5 million in NFTs.
“The wallet was purchased directly from you. The seed phrase was stored in a secure location and never entered online. I did not sign any malicious transactions. Everything is in my physical possession, and I haven’t used the device for two months. Can you explain what happened?” wrote Anchor Drops.
A community member under the pseudonym KDean responded, identifying a suspicious Ethereum transaction approved by the user on February 22, 2022, tagged as Fake_Phishing5443.
Sorry to hear man. Looks like the phish happened a few years ago and just woke up. pic.twitter.com/OjzyYXQFKf
— KDean (@kdean) December 13, 2024
“Sorry to hear, man. Looks like the phishing happened a few years ago and just woke up,” he wrote.
This transaction explains the loss of NFTs, but it remains unclear how it could have contributed to the theft of bitcoins, noted Fuzzland’s lead security researcher Tony Ke in a comment to Cointelegraph.
Senior researcher at Cyvers, Hakan Unal, suggested that the perpetrator’s actions might have granted access to all blockchains supported by the wallet.
The Ledger team took a similar stance:
“As far as we know, the user fell victim to a phishing attack involving an ETH wallet. We suspect user error also occurred on the Bitcoin side.”
In response to Anchor Drops’ inquiries, the hardware wallet developers recommended contacting law enforcement to track and block the stolen assets. The support team assured their readiness to assist in the investigation.
Losing funds and NFTs is an incredibly distressing experience, let us share a few things that we hope can be of help.
First, it’s important to clarify that Ledger’s security model is designed to ensure that private keys are generated and stored securely within the Secure Element…
— Ledger (@Ledger) December 13, 2024
“Ledger wallets have never been hacked remotely (or physically), such incidents often result from phishing attacks or pre-authorized approvals,” stated the Ledger team.
Back in December 2023, hackers compromised the Ledger Connect Kit library for decentralized applications, causing user losses of approximately $600,000.