Comment by Neywiny
18 days ago
My gut reaction is that a hardware implant would be too costly so there's no way they'd actually do that but I guess when you can steal $92M, anything is possible. They could even fab an esoteric chip and still make a profit.
Why do you think it's too costly? It's well known that there are divisions in DPRK that are focused on generating $ through crypto hacks and compromises.
We're dealing with reasonably sophisticated state actors here in this dark forest; not script kiddies.
Cheap $5 PCB + programmable small FPGA is a very viable route too for hardware implants; but even a microcontroller / ESP32/etc will probably do.
DPRK makes about a third to half of their foreign exchange income from crypto hacks. It's significant.
> A technical account published by Tibane Labs described an arrangement involving a microcontroller, cellular communication hardware and connections to the screen’s internal data lines.
Cellular communications hardware seems very sophisticated and expensive compared to a simple microcontroller.
It's not though, it's a pretty standard component.
Other commentator covered it a bit but BOM cost is a negligible percentage
If you slide through and ignore the writing, the linked implant teardown is wild - https://www.tibane.net/research/ledger-nano-x-implant
They did, in fact, appear to mass-manufacture a custom-built flat flex implant with cellular (LTE-M!), eSIM, and everything that hid right inside the Ledger, sniffing the SPI reads to the display to read the recovery phrases it pukes out and send 'em over cellular to the ringleader.
It's an EXTREMELY well built implant. I'm impressed. Multiple revisions, even.
The money's too hot to not build shit like this and slip it into the stream. Even a few thousand in R&D netting a six figure ROI is worth it, getting millions is just the icing.
Custom flex PCBs designed to line up precisely on top of an existing PCB seems to be a fairly standard technique for games console mod chips (particularly Nintendo Switch) these days.
But yeah, putting a cellular modem and eSIM on there is certainly taking it to the next level
PCBWay will make anything you send them for reasonable pricing. Custom boards etc are not at all hard to manufacture, and for the amount of money you can get, of course you can team up with someone. I think the most people overestimate the cost of bespoke PCB creation.
Dangerous things sells implantable chips.
Eg. https://dangerousthings.com/products/apex-flex?Antenna=Narro...
It's not that kind of implant.
If it makes no sense economically there's a good chance (in general) that it was an intelligence agency of a superpower