A team of hackers has successfully unlocked a Bitcoin wallet containing $3 million after its owner had forgotten the password 11 years ago.
The anonymous owner, driven by a growing sense of urgency as the value of Bitcoin skyrocketed, reached out to renowned security expert Joe Grand, known in the hacking community as “Kingpin.”
Grand, an electrical engineer with a reputation for recovering lost cryptocurrency, took on the challenge.
The wallet, holding 43.6 BTC, had been secured by a password generated using an older version of Roboform, a password management tool.
The owner had been so paranoid about security at the time that he encrypted the text file containing the password, making recovery efforts even more complicated.
The wallet owner recounted his initial steps: “I generated the password, copied it, and put it in the wallet’s passphrase and an encrypted text file.” When he lost access to the account, Bitcoin’s value was between $3,000 and $4,000, but it has since surged by over 20,000 per cent.
Grand employed a tool developed by the US National Security Agency (NSA) to reverse-engineer the Roboform software.
He discovered that while Roboform’s passwords appeared random, they were predictable if one could control the software’s internal clock.
By setting the clock back to 2013, the year the password was created, Grand and his colleague Bruno generated millions of potential passwords.
After numerous attempts, they managed to recreate the correct password. “We were ultimately lucky that our parameters and time range were right,” Grand said, acknowledging the element of chance involved.
