In a remarkable turn of events, security researchers have successfully cracked the password to recover over $3 million worth of Bitcoin that had been trapped in a crypto wallet for 11 years. The wallet, which had been locked away since 2013, was inaccessible due to a forgotten password.
Cracking Time to Recover Lost Password
The lost password was generated by a random password generator called RoboForm. It was a complex combination of 20 upper and lower case letters, along with numbers, designed to be exceedingly difficult to crack. The wallet’s owner, who preferred to remain anonymous, explained in a video published by Joe Grand (also known as ‘Kingpin’) that he had generated the password, copied it, and used it as the passphrase for the wallet. He also encrypted it in a separate text file. Unfortunately, the encrypted part of the owner’s computer that stored the password became corrupted, leading to its loss.
At the time, the Bitcoin was worth only a few thousand euros, which the owner described as “painful but OK.” Over the next decade, the lost Bitcoin grew exponentially in value as the price of bitcoin surged by over 20,000 percent. Faced with the newfound fortune, the owner reached out to Mr. Grand for help in recovering the funds. Initially hesitant, Grand eventually agreed to take up the challenge and devised a novel method to hack the initial password generator.
Using a reverse engineering tool developed by the US National Security Agency (NSA), Grand disassembled the code of the password generator. He discovered that the supposedly random passwords generated by RoboForm were not truly random. In older versions of the software, if one could manipulate the system to believe it was the moment in 2013 when the password was generated, it would reproduce the same password. With a rough estimate of when the password was originally created, Grand collaborated with his colleague Bruno to generate millions of potential passwords until they eventually cracked it.
It’s worth noting that the RoboForm password generator has since updated its platform to enhance the randomness of its tool, rendering the time-based hacking approach ineffective for passwords created after 2015.
Hope for the Crypto Community
The recovery of the lost Bitcoin wallet by the European man serves as a beacon of hope for many in the crypto community. It underscores the importance of secure storage practices and the potential for recovery even in seemingly dire situations.
