Good day everyone,
I hope you are all having a good day, welcome to CryptoGod-1's blog on all things crypto. In this post I will be looking at events which took place at the end of May 2024, in which a team of security researchers managed to crack the password for a lost Bitcoin wallet worth over $3 million.
Bitcoin Wallet Cracked
A team of security researchers have managed to successfully crack the password of a Bitcoin wallet worth over $3 million.
- Bitcoin wallets come in various forms, which includes hardware wallets, and they are digital tools used to store, send, and receive Bitcoin. Hardware wallets store private keys offline and are able to offer high security.
- Software wallets on the other hand are applications which are installed on computers or mobile devices and provide convenience. They also require robust security measures.
- Paper wallets are physical documents containing public and private keys, offering cold storage but vulnerable to physical damage or loss.
The wallet had been left idle for 11 years after it had been locked away in 2013 but the password was later lost. The owner of the wallet hired electrical engineer Joe Grand, also known as ‘Kingpin,’ to hack into the encrypted file and recover his 43.6 BTC. The recovery is a significant victory for the owner of the wallet, while it also showed potential for the broader crypto community of the potential when it comes to inaccessible wallets.
The password for the locked wallet had been created by a random password generator called RoboForm. It had a combination of 20 upper and lower case letters, along with numbers, designed to be exceedingly difficult to crack. The owner of the wallet decided to remain anonymous but explained in a video published by Grand that he had generated the password, copied it, and used it as the passphrase for the wallet. He had also encrypted the password in a separate text file.
The loss of the password came about after the encrypted part of the owner’s computer that stored the password became corrupted. Back then Bitcoin was only worth a couple of thousand and the owner had described it as painful but OK. As the price of Bitcoin rose over the next decade, the lost Bitcoin grew exponentially in value as the price of bitcoin surged by over 20,000 percent. With the newfound value in the wallet, the owner decided to reach out to Mr. Grand and enlisted his services to crack the code.
Mr. Grand was initially hesitant, but he eventually agreed to the job and devised a novel method to hack the initial password generator. Mr. Grand was able to reverse engineer the password using a tool developed by the US National Security Agency (NSA). He made use of the tool to disassemble the code of the password generator and discovered that the passwords being created by the RoboForm device were not truly random.
Older versions of the software allowed for the manipulation of the system to believe it was the moment back in 2013 when the password was originally generated. It would then reproduce the same password. There was a rough estimate of when the password had been originally created, and therefore Grand was able to collaborate with his colleague Bruno to generate millions of potential passwords until they eventually cracked it.
RoboForm password generator has since updated its platform to enhance the randomness of its tool and therefore the use of the time-based hacking approach is not effective for passwords created beyond 2015.
Mr Grand hopes to now help more people locked out of their crypto wallets, though said new approaches may be needed. He stated:
“If this project required hacking time, what dimension are we going to have to hack next?”
Have a great day.
Peace. CryptoGod-1.
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