Trezor finds the CryptoBilis spy chip in its own wallets, and ships firmware that blinds it

Last month it was Ledger. Hardware wallets sold through CryptoBilis, a cut-price reseller in Southeast Asia, turned out to carry a hidden chip that copied the owner's recovery phrase and sent it out over a mobile network. Now Trezor has confirmed that some of its wallets got the same treatment.

In an update dated 12 November, Trezor said three Safe 5 wallets bought from CryptoBilis between 20 August and 23 September had an extra circuit board squeezed between the main board and the screen. The board leaves the firmware and the secure chip alone. It just reads the display, which during setup or recovery shows every recovery word and any passphrase, encrypts what it sees and sends it to a server over the mobile network. Forty-eight CryptoBilis customers have come forward so far, none of the three owners has reported losing money, and Trezor found no tampering in stock from its other resellers.

What's new is a fix, of sorts. Firmware 2.13.1, released on 11 November, includes a protection that Trezor says stops the implants it has found from capturing anything, and The Hacker News reports it covers the Safe 7, Safe 5, Safe 3 and Model T. It can't help with a phrase that was already captured. So if you bought from CryptoBilis, update, and still move your coins to a new wallet with a freshly generated recovery phrase. Trezor will replace any device bought from that reseller since March 2026, and it has dropped about 80% of its resellers worldwide. It also warns that scammers are posing as its support staff: deal only with trezor.io/support, and treat anyone who asks for your recovery words as a thief.

The firmware itself is installed through Trezor Suite; for the rest of the programs on a Windows PC, Tendvane's app updates through winget handle the same chore.