Hardware · The truth
Can a Ledger or a Trezor be «hacked» to recover? The truth
The short answer is no, and it is worth having that clear before someone charges you for the opposite. The long answer has interesting nuances, because there have been genuine findings, and understanding why they don’t help you is what protects you from the scam.
What a hardware wallet actually protects
The key isn’t in ordinary memory. It is in a chip designed to resist extraction: it protects against physical tampering, against manipulating voltage to induce faults, against measuring power consumption and against opening the package. It is the same family of chips used in bank cards and passports.
On top of that, the key isn’t stored as-is: it is mixed with the PIN. Without the PIN, even being able to read the memory would yield nothing useful.
What has genuinely happened
There have been researchers who, with the device in a lab, specialised equipment and sometimes physically opening it, extracted information from specific, old models. That is published, serious, real work. And it has three characteristics that make it useless for your case:
- They affected specific models and versions, patched by the manufacturer shortly afterwards.
- They required lab equipment and months of specialist work, not a commercial service.
- They destroyed the device in many cases, with no guaranteed result.
What you are actually being sold
The uncomfortable consequence
If you have the device, don’t remember the PIN and don’t have the phrase, your case has no way out. I say it plainly because it is exactly what the device was designed to achieve, and that same impossibility is what protects every other user. The security working against you today is what stopped you being robbed before.
Where work is genuinely possible with hardware wallets: when you have the phrase and are missing a word, or when you forgot the extra password and remember something of it. Those are in I lost one word of my seed and in the «25th word».