- Wallet had been locked for 11 years after owner lost the password
- Bitcoin contained within it had massively appreciated in value during past 11 years
- Innovative solution was needed to crack the problem
Forgetting a password is a problem most of us have experienced. Usually, it is just frustrating and requires a few minutes to reset it before you can access whatever it is you are after. But for one man a lost password ended up with him being unable to access a bitcoin wallet worth millions – until now.
The crypto wallet contained more than $3 million of bitcoin, end up being locked for more than a decade, before being finally opened by security researchers.
Password problems
Joe Grand, better known in the sector as ‘Kingpin’, was tasked with hacking into the wallet, which held 43.6 BTC. The wallet had become locked after its owner, who has chosen to remain anonymous lost the password.
A further problem was that the password had been designed to be as difficult as possible to crack. It contained a sequence of 20 characters comprising upper and lower case letters and numbers. The wallet’s owner had copied the password and encrypted it – which is sensible – but problems arose when the part of the owner’s computer with the password on it became corrupted.
At the time, the bitcoin was worth about $1,500, so while the loss was painful, it was bearable. But as time went on, the bitcoin quickly appreciated in value – by about 20,000%, which prompted the owner to reach out to Kingpin.
Controlling time
Kingpin was able to crack the wallet after devising a way to hack the initial password generator, using a reverse engineering tool developed by the US National Security Agency. The password generator’s passwords were not randomly generated, so Kingpin worked out with that version of the software, if time could be controlled, so could the password – so he tricked the system to think it was the time in 2013 when the password was generated and it recreated the password.
Kingpin now hopes to help more people with locked crypto wallets.
