{"id":12199,"date":"2024-05-30T08:43:19","date_gmt":"2024-05-30T08:43:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/used82.com\/?p=12199"},"modified":"2024-05-30T08:43:19","modified_gmt":"2024-05-30T08:43:19","slug":"hackers-finally-unlock-3-million-bitcoin-wallet-after-man-forgot-password-for-11-years","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/used82.com\/?p=12199","title":{"rendered":"Hackers finally unlock $3 million Bitcoin wallet after man forgot password for 11 years"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

The anonymous wallet owner finally got back access to his $3 million Bitcoin wallet<\/h2>\n

A team of hackers have finally unlocked a $3 million Bitcoin wallet after a man forgot his password for 11 years.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I mean,\u00a0forgetting your password<\/a>\u00a0is certainly a pain, but it’s usually not the end of the world.<\/p>\n

But to forget your password for a whopping $3 million\u00a0Bitcoin<\/a>\u00a0wallet? Well, that is pretty devastating.<\/p>\n

Thankfully, however, security researchers have cracked a password to recover the massive amounts of\u00a0money<\/a>\u00a0after it had been stuck in crypto wallet for 11 years.<\/p>\n

\n
\"You'd<\/div>\n

You’d want to make sure you’d never forgotten the password to a $3 million wallet (Getty Stock Photo)<\/cite><\/div>\n

Electrical engineer Joe Grand, who goes by the handle \u2018Kingpin\u2019 online, was hired to hack into an encrypted file holding 43.6 BTC.<\/p>\n

The high worth of\u00a0cryptocurrency<\/a>\u00a0was protected by a password created by a random password generator called Roboform – but the password had since been lost.<\/p>\n

The anonymous owner worried that someone would hack his computer and obtain his password – ultimately gaining access to his cryptocurrency.<\/p>\n

“At [that] time, I was really paranoid with my security,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

So, the owner asked Grand for his help, after he became known in the community in 2022 for helping another crypto owner recover access to over $2 million in cryptocurrency he thought he’d lost forever.<\/p>\n

Grand says dozens of people have previously contacted him to ask for help with recovering lost treasure.<\/p>\n

\n
\"Joe<\/div>\n

Joe Grand to the rescue. (YouTube\/Joe Grand)<\/cite><\/div>\n

However, Grand decided to turn a lot of them down for various reasons, but decided to help this particular anonymous owner with his quest.<\/p>\n

In a\u00a0YouTube<\/a>\u00a0video published by Grand, the wallet’s owner said: “I generated the password, I copied it, put it in the passphrase of the wallet, and also in a text file that I then encrypted.”<\/p>\n

At the time of the owner losing access to the account, the Bitcoin worth stood between $3,000 and $4,000.<\/p>\n

But as the price of bitcoin had risen by more than 20,000 percent, the owner decided to reach out to Grand.<\/p>\n

So, Grand used a tool developed by the US National Security Agency (NSA) to disassemble the password generator\u2019s code.<\/p>\n

He said: “In a perfect world, when you generate a password with a password generator, you expect to get a unique, random output each time that no one else has.<\/p>\n

“[But] in this version of RoboForm, it was not the case.<\/p>\n

“While RoboForm\u2019s passwords appear to be randomly generated, they\u2019re not. With the older versions of this software, if we can control the time, we can control the password.”<\/p>\n

Grand was able to trick the system by changing the time back to 2013 when the password was generated, and after a few failed attempts, it ultimately led to the same password being recreated.<\/p>\n

The hacking expert then worked with his colleague Bruno to generate millions of potential passwords.<\/p>\n

He was able to eventually crack the code – which Grant said to Wired was ‘ultimately lucky’.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe ultimately got lucky that our parameters and time range was right. If either of those were wrong, we would have \u2026 continued to take guesses\/shots in the dark.\u201d he\u00a0told<\/a>\u00a0them in an email.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The anonymous wallet owner finally got back access to his $3 million Bitcoin wallet A…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12199","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"views":76,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/used82.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12199","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/used82.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/used82.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/used82.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/used82.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12199"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/used82.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12199\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/used82.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12199"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/used82.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12199"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/used82.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12199"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}