Two hackers reportedly cracked the forgotten password of a digital wallet containing a treasure trove of Bitcoin (BTC).
Wired reports that in 2013, a cryptocurrency owner who goes by the alias “Michael” stored his Bitcoin holdings in a password-protected digital wallet.
Unfortunately, the password was stored in an encrypted file that later got corrupted, leaving Michael unable to access the wallet and 43.6 BTC, which was worth $5,300 at the time.
People who specialize in cracking cryptography told Michael that he could no longer retrieve his crypto assets after losing the password, but two digital wallet hackers, Grand and Bruno, eventually decided to help.
The duo spent months reverse-engineering the version of the RoboForm password program that Michael used for his digital wallet. They discovered that the supposedly random passwords that the tool generated were not truly random because they were tied to the computer’s date and time.
By knowing the time when Michael generated the password and the parameters he used to generate the password, such as the number of characters and the use of lower- and upper-case letters, figures, and special characters, Grand and Bruno thought that cracking the password would be more manageable.
It took time because Michael could not remember when he created the password. He only knew that he moved Bitcoin into his wallet for the first time on April 14, 2013, and that two of the other passwords that he generated with RoboForm in 2013 did not use special characters.
But in November, Grand and Bruno finally found the correct password. It has no special characters and was generated on May 15, 2013, at 4:10:40 PM GMT.
Says Grand,
“We ultimately got lucky that our parameters and time range was right. If either of those were wrong, we would have… continued to take guesses/shots in the dark. It would have taken significantly longer to precompute all the possible passwords.”
Bitcoin was worth $38,000 when Michael regained access to the digital wallet, but he waited until the price rose to $62,000 before he sold some of the assets.
He now holds 30 BTC, which is currently worth over $2 million at the current price of $67,543.
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