A Bitcoin wallet containing $3 million was finally accessed after the owner had been locked out for 11 years due to a forgotten password.
It’s one thing to find an old ten dollar bill in a forgotten bag, but imagine the thrill of regaining access to $3 million in Bitcoin after over a decade of being locked out of your wallet.
An anonymous Bitcoin holder reached out to electrical engineer Joe Grand, known online as ‘Kingpin,’ for assistance in accessing an encrypted file containing 43.6 BTC.
To secure his cryptocurrency, the owner had originally used a random password generator called Roboform, but unfortunately, he lost the password over time.
Fearing that someone could hack into his computer and steal his cryptocurrency, the owner became ‘really paranoid’ and sought Kingpin’s expertise to recover access. Previously, Grand had successfully helped another individual regain control of over $2 million in crypto in 2022.
Grand mentioned that numerous people have contacted him for help in retrieving lost digital assets.
While Grand turned down many requests, he chose to assist this particular individual on his journey to recover the lost Bitcoin.
In a YouTube video shared by Grand, the wallet owner explained: “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.”
When access to the wallet was initially lost, the Bitcoin was valued between $3,000 and $4,000.
However, as Bitcoin’s value surged over 20,000 percent, the owner decided to enlist Grand’s help.
To tackle the problem, Grand employed a tool developed by the US National Security Agency (NSA) to break down the password generator’s code.
Grand noted: “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.
“[But] in this version of RoboForm, it was not the case.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5IySpAkThg
“While RoboForm’s passwords appear to be randomly generated, they’re not. With the older versions of this software, if we can control the time, we can control the password.”
Grand managed to deceive the system by setting the time back to 2013, when the password was initially generated. After a few failed attempts, this approach eventually led to the recreation of the original password.
Teaming up with his colleague Bruno, Grand generated millions of potential passwords in pursuit of the correct one.
Ultimately, they succeeded in cracking the code, which Grand attributed largely to luck, as he explained to Wired.
“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.” he shared in an email.