News
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.
I intend, forget your password It’s certainly a nuisance, but it’s usually not the end of the world.
But forget the password for the exorbitant sum of 3 million dollars Bitcoin wallet? Well, it’s pretty devastating.
Thankfully, however, security researchers were able to crack a password to recover huge amounts of files money after being stuck in the crypto wallet for 11 years.
You should make sure you never forgot the password to a $3 million wallet (Getty Stock Photo)
Electrical engineer Joe Grand, known online as “Kingpin,” 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 since been lost.
The anonymous owner feared someone could hack into his computer and get his password, ultimately gaining access to his cryptocurrency.
“TO [that] time, I was really paranoid about my safety,” he said.
Then, the owner asked Grand for his help, after he became known in the community in 2022 for helping another cryptocurrency owner regain access to over $2 million in cryptocurrency he thought he had lost forever.
Grand says dozens of people have contacted him previously for help in recovering the lost treasure.
However, Grand decided to reject many of them for various reasons, but decided to help this particular anonymous owner in his search.
In a Youtube In the video posted by Grand, the wallet owner said: “I generated the password, copied it, put it in the wallet’s passphrase and also in a text file which I then encrypted.”
At the time the owner lost access to the account, the value of the Bitcoin was between $3,000 and $4,000.
But since the price of bitcoin had increased by more than 20,000%, the owner decided to contact Grand.
Therefore, Grand used a tool developed by the US National Security Agency (NSA) to disassemble the password generator code.
He said: “In a perfect world, when you generate a password with a password generator, you expect to get a unique, random output every time that no one else has.
“[But] in this version of RoboForm this was not the case.
“Even though 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 resetting the time to 2013 when the password was generated, and after a few failed attempts, it ultimately led to the recreation of the same password.
The hacking expert then worked with colleague Bruno to generate millions of potential passwords.
He eventually managed to crack the code, which Grand told Wired was “ultimately lucky.”
“In the end we were lucky that our parameters and time frame were correct. If any of these had been wrong, we would have… continued to make guesses/shots in the dark.” Him said send them via email.
Featured image credit: YouTube/Joe Grand
Themes: Cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, Technology, Money