Résumé
On 14 December 2023, hundreds of popular crypto websites, including SushiSwap and Zapper, suddenly started trying to empty their visitors' wallets, all at once, and none of them had been hacked directly. The poison was in a shared ingredient: Ledger's Connect Kit, a tiny library that thousands of decentralized apps load to let users connect their wallets. An attacker who phished a former Ledger employee published a malicious version, and because most of those apps loaded the library live from a CDN rather than a pinned copy, the bad code reached every visitor within minutes. It is the lesson that loading code live from a third party means inheriting that third party's worst day, instantly and everywhere.
How it happened
It started with phishing and a forgotten offboarding. The attacker phished a former Ledger employee whose npm publishing access had never been revoked when they left the company, stealing an active session token that let them bypass 2FA entirely. With that access, they published malicious versions (1.1.5 through 1.1.7) of @ledgerhq/connect-kit, replacing the library's normal code with a wallet drainer: the off-the-shelf "Angel Drainer" malware-as-a-service kit, which split stolen funds 85% to the attacker and 15% to the kit's operators. The first two versions pulled the drainer from a secondary malicious npm package; the third embedded it directly.
The amplifier was how the library is loaded. Thousands of decentralized apps pull Connect Kit dynamically through a CDN <script> tag rather than bundling a pinned copy. So the poisoned version was served automatically to every visitor of every affected site, with no action by the site owners, injecting a fake wallet-connection popup that prompted users to sign transactions that drained their assets. One compromised dependency hit hundreds of front ends simultaneously: a supply-chain attack with an enormous reach.
The damage and response
The malicious code was live for roughly five hours, with active draining under two of those, and Ledger shipped a clean version about forty minutes after being notified. Around $600,000 was stolen, a small figure given the reach, kept low only by the short window and fast response; with hundreds of major DeFi front ends (SushiSwap, Zapper, Balancer, Revoke.cash, Kyber, and more) serving the drainer at once, it could have been catastrophic. Tether froze the attacker's stolen USDT, and Ledger committed to reimbursing affected users.
Why Ledger Connect Kit still matters
It teaches two lessons. First, the cost of loading code live from a third party: when you pull a library straight from a CDN at run time, you ship whatever they ship, including a compromise, to all your users at once, so pin versions, self-host, or lock assets with Subresource Integrity (SRI). Second, offboarding hygiene: a departed employee's publishing access should be revoked the day they leave (and their live sessions killed, not just their password), because here it was the entire foothold. And on the user side, clear-signing and transaction simulation matter, so a fake "approve" prompt reveals its true, malicious destination before anyone signs. It is the same drainer-through-the-supply-chain pattern as the Solana web3.js compromise a year later.
Comment le corriger
- Pull the malicious package versions, publish a clean release, and tell downstream apps to update or pin immediately.
- Revoke the compromised npm account and every other access the departed employee retained, kill live sessions, and rotate all publish tokens.
- Reimburse and warn affected users, and work with chain analytics to flag the drainer's destination addresses.
Comment l’éviter
- Pin exact dependency versions and self-host or SRI-lock CDN-loaded libraries instead of trusting floating CDN script tags.
- Require signed, provenance-verified npm releases and enable npm 2FA plus publish protections on all maintainer accounts.
- Revoke npm, registry, and session-token access immediately at employee offboarding and rotate credentials.
- Enforce clear-signing and transaction simulation so users see real recipients and amounts before approving.
- Monitor published package versions and CDN assets for unexpected releases or content changes.
Références
- https://www.ledger.com/blog/security-incident-report
- https://slowmist.medium.com/supply-chain-attack-on-ledger-connect-kit-analyzing-the-impact-and-preventive-measures-1005e39422fd
- https://www.sonatype.com/blog/decrypting-the-ledger-connect-kit-compromise-a-deep-dive-into-the-crypto-drainer-attack
- https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/ledger-dapp-supply-chain-attack-steals-600k-from-crypto-wallets/
Vulnérabilités liées
Tout Web3 →- CRITICALWEB3-KELPDAO-LAYERZERO-2026
On April 18, 2026, North Korea's Lazarus Group drained about 116,500 rsETH (roughly $292 million) from KelpDAO's LayerZero-based bridge, the largest DeFi exploit of the year. No smart contract was broken; the contracts did exactly what they were written to do. The attack was against the bridge's off-chain verification. rsETH's LayerZero channel was configured to trust a single verifier (a 1-of-1 DVN), so the attackers compromised LayerZero's internal RPC nodes, knocked out the honest external node with a denial-of-service flood, and forced that single verifier to attest to a cross-chain message that never really happened. The Ethereum side then released unbacked rsETH from escrow, leaving wrapped rsETH stranded across more than twenty chains and triggering a bank-run across DeFi.
- HIGHWEB3-FRONTEND-DNS-HIJACK-2022
A frontend hijack leaves the on-chain contracts untouched but replaces the Web2 surface serving the dApp UI with a wallet-drainer clone, so no Solidity audit can catch it. The recurring pattern: attackers take over the domain registrar or DNS provider account (or a CDN/tag-manager account), repoint the domain to a cloned site, and prompt visitors to sign malicious token approvals, EIP-2612 permit signatures, or transfers. Curve Finance was hit twice: on August 9-10, 2022 its curve.fi domain was DNS-hijacked via a compromised nameserver and drained ~$570K in USDC/DAI; and again around May 12, 2025 at the registrar level, after which Curve permanently migrated to curve.finance and announced an ENS move (Convex Finance and Resupply, which depend on Curve's data feeds, suffered dependency-driven outages but were not themselves compromised). In July 2024 a mass wave hit DeFi domains registered through Squarespace, whose forced migration off Google Domains stripped 2FA: Compound's frontend redirected to an Inferno Drainer clone and 100+ protocols were exposed (Celer blocked its takeover via domain monitoring). Ambient Finance's domain was hijacked through stolen registrar credentials on October 17, 2024. Most recently, on April 14, 2026 attackers used forged identity documents to social-engineer the registrar into handing over DNS control of CoW Swap's swap.cow.fi and cow.fi domains, redirecting users to a pixel-perfect drainer clone for about 90 minutes; over $1M was taken in roughly three hours, including 219 ETH (~$750K) from a single wallet, while CoW's contracts, backend APIs, and solver network were untouched. The same bucket includes CDN-account injections (KyberSwap's September 2022 Cloudflare/Google Tag Manager compromise, ~$265K) and BGP route hijacks that swap signed bundles for drainer code.
- HIGHWEB3-CURVE-DNS-2025
On May 12, 2025, attackers hijacked Curve Finance's primary domain, curve.fi, at the registrar and DNS level and pointed visitors at a wallet-draining clone of the site. Curve's smart contracts and on-chain funds were never touched; this was a Web2 attack on the domain, the soft underbelly that no Solidity audit can protect. The nameservers for curve.fi were swapped to attacker-controlled infrastructure at the registrar (iwantmyname, the same registrar implicated in Curve's 2022 hijack), and the clone prompted users to approve malicious token transactions. On-chain analysts estimated user losses around $520,000, most of it taken in the first ninety minutes. Curve repointed the domain to neutral nameservers, then permanently migrated to curve.finance and signaled a move toward decentralized (ENS) hosting.
- CRITICALWEB3-KILOEX-2025
On April 14, 2025 the perpetuals DEX KiloEx lost about $7.5 million across BNB Chain, Base, opBNB, and Taiko to what was reported as oracle price manipulation but was really an access-control failure. KiloEx's price feed (KiloPriceFeed.setPrices) was meant to be reachable only through a keeper-gated call chain, but the top-level MinimalForwarder.execute function was publicly callable and validated an attacker-supplied signature against attacker-supplied data, letting anyone forge a trusted call that reached setPrices and write an arbitrary price. The attacker set a market price far below true value, opened a leveraged position, then set the price far above value and closed it in the same flow, extracting fabricated profit from the vault; the sequence was repeated across all four chains, with a single transaction netting $3.12M. Reporting that framed it as flash-loan oracle manipulation was imprecise: no market liquidity was moved, the price was simply written directly through the unprotected forwarder. After KiloEx offered a 10% (~$750K) whitehat bounty and no legal action, the attacker returned essentially all of the funds by April 18, 2025.
- CRITICALWEB3-BYBIT-2025
On 21 February 2025, the crypto exchange Bybit lost about $1.5 billion in ether, the largest hack in history, to North Korea's Lazarus Group. Bybit had done what custody best-practice prescribes: the funds sat in a cold wallet behind a multisig requiring several human signers. The attackers beat it anyway, not by stealing keys but by tampering with what the signers saw. Weeks earlier they had compromised a developer at Safe, the multisig-wallet provider, and slipped malicious code into the Safe web app, so that when Bybit's executives reviewed a routine transfer, the screen showed a legitimate transaction while their hardware wallets were actually signing a malicious one that handed the wallet to the attacker. It is the defining lesson that a multisig is only as trustworthy as the screen you approve it on, and that blind-signing is the modern crypto catastrophe.
- CRITICALWEB3-RADIANT-2024
On October 16, 2024, the cross-chain lending protocol Radiant Capital lost roughly $50M (about $53M across Arbitrum and BSC) after attackers compromised the devices of at least three of its multisig signers. Initial access began September 11, 2024 via a Telegram message spoofing a trusted former contractor, delivering a ZIP with a decoy PDF that was actually a macOS application carrying INLETDRIFT backdoor malware. The malware sat between the signers' browsers and their hardware wallets, so the Safe (Gnosis) UI and Tenderly simulations displayed correct data while the signers blind-signed a malicious transferOwnership() call on the LendingPoolAddressesProvider contract; the 3-of-11 threshold was met and the attacker then upgraded the pools to a malicious implementation and drained them. Mandiant assessed with high confidence the attack was conducted by North Korea-linked UNC4736 (aka Citrine Sleet/AppleJeus), part of the Lazarus cluster. Funds were not recovered and the protocol later wound down.