Bitcoin
Hackers Finally Unlock $3 Million Bitcoin Wallet After Man Forgot Password for 11 Years
A team of hackers has finally unlocked a $3 million Bitcoin wallet after a man forgot his password for 11 years.
What I mean to say, forgetting your password It’s certainly a pain, but it’s usually not the end of the world.
But forgetting your password for a whopping $3 million Bitcoin portfolio? Well, that’s pretty devastating.
Fortunately, however, security researchers cracked a password to recover the massive amounts of money after being trapped in the crypto wallet for 11 years.
Would you like to make sure you never forget the password to a $3 million wallet? (Getty Stock Photo)
Electrical engineer Joe Grand, who goes by the name ‘Kingpin’ online, was hired to hack an encrypted file containing 43.6 BTC.
The high value of cryptocurrency it was protected by a password created by a random password generator called Roboform – but the password had already been lost.
The anonymous owner feared someone would hack his computer and obtain his password – ultimately gaining access to his cryptocurrency.
“At the [that] time, I was really paranoid about my safety,” he said.
So the owner turned to Grand for help, after he became well-known in the community in 2021 for helping another crypto owner regain access to over $2 million worth of cryptocurrency he thought he had lost forever.
Grand says dozens of people have already contacted him to ask for help recovering lost treasures.
However, Grand decided to turn down many of them for various reasons, but decided to help this particular anonymous owner in his search.
On a YouTube video published by Grand, the owner of the wallet said: “I generated the password, copied it, put it in the wallet password and also in a text file that I then encrypted.”
At the time the owner lost access to the account, the value of Bitcoin was between $3,000 and $4,000.
But as the price of bitcoin rose more than 20,000%, the owner decided to contact Grand.
Thus, Grand used a tool developed by the US National Security Agency (NSA) to dismantle the password generator code.
He said: “In a perfect world, when you generate a password with a password generator, you would expect to get unique, random output each time that no one else has.
“[But] in this version of RoboForm, that was not the case.
“Although RoboForm passwords appear to be randomly generated, they are not. With older versions of this software, if we can control the time, we can control the password.”
Grand managed to trick the system by changing the time to 2013 when the password was generated, and after a few failed attempts, this ended up resulting in the same password being recreated.
The hacking expert then worked with his colleague Bruno to generate millions of potential passwords.
He finally managed to crack the code – which Grand told Wired was “ultimately luck.”
“Ultimately, we were lucky because our parameters and time frame were correct. If any of them were wrong, we would have…continued to make assumptions/shots in the dark.” he counted them in an email.
Featured image credit: YouTube/Joe Grand
Topics: Cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, Technology, Money