An owner of a crypto wallet has lost his password. The case was almost hopeless, but in the end turned out to be a blessing for the owner
Forgetting passwords is not usually a bad thing. In most cases, they can simply be reset via the stored email address. However, there are also passwords that cannot be recovered so easily.
For example, if you have a crypto wallet. You should never forget (or lose) the password for this, otherwise you will no longer have access to Bitcoins and Co.
This is what happened to an anonymous owner of a crypto wallet from Europe, who our colleagues atWiredsimplyMichael
call him. He lost the twenty-digit password he created eleven years ago for his Bitcoin wallet because he kept it in an encrypted file that was corrupted.
As it is a complex password (from a password generator), which sometimes also consists of special characters, it was almost impossible to crack. In the end, however, it succeeded and it turned out to be a real blessing for the owner that he had no access to the wallet for so long
What happened?
Two years ago, Michael asked Joe Grand, a hardware hacker who specializes in such cases, for help. He has made a name for himself in the past by helping the owner of a crypto wallet to crack the access PIN and save two million US dollars in cryptocurrency.
But because Michael’s case involved a software-based wallet, Grand initially turned down the task.
At the time, one Bitcoin was worth around 40,000 US dollars.Michael’s 43.6 Bitcoins were therefore worth around 1.74 million US dollars (1.6 million euros). An impressive sum, especially as he had paid just 4,000 euros for them in 2013.
In June last year, however, Michael asked Grand again. And this time he agreed, probably also because he had another specialist in cracking digital wallets at his side – Bruno from Germany. You can watch the video here:
A security vulnerability led to success
The two spent months reverse-engineering how the RoboForm password generator had created the password
They discovered that in 2013, RoboFarm did not generate passwords completely randomly, but based on date and time.
They then narrowed down the time period in which the password was generatedand were finally able to crack it.
RoboFarm said it had already changed the password creation process in 2015, meaning that the security gap was closed.
For Michael, the long wait ultimately turned out to be a blessing. Bitcoin is now worth much more than it was two years ago; over 60,000 euros (65,000 US dollars).
This means that the value of his 43.6 Bitcoins has risen by almost another million.
Michael himself says that he would have sold all of his Bitcoins two years ago. Now, however, he has only sold some of them and wants to wait until the Bitcoin price rises to 90,000 euros before selling the rest.
