Hacking time to recover $3m worth of lost Bitcoin.

Sounds crazy, right?

This is how two white hackers cracked an 11 year old password behind this massive fortune.. 🧁

In 2013, an anonymous crypto user, 'Michael,' purchased 43.6 BTC (approximately $5,000 at the time).

He stored the BTC in a password-protected digital wallet.

The password, a 20-character string, was created randomly using a password generator called RoboForm.

Too paranoid to store the password inside RoboForm, Michael uploaded it to an encryption tool called TrueCrypt.

Good enough.. Or so he thought.

Eventually, the container storing his password got corrupted.

Any hopes of accessing it was gone.

“Okay, crap. It was a couple of thousand euros which was painful, but okay.” he states.

However, as time went on, BTC went on a parabolic run.

What was once $5k in BTC swiftly turned into millions.

In 2022, Michael reached out to Joe Grand and his friend Bruno.

Joe is an electrical engineer who’s been hardware hacking since the age of 10.

He’s an established white hacker who gained notoriety after exploiting a vulnerability in Trezor to recover $2m.

In hopes of a similar recovery story, Michael reached out to the two and explained his situation.

Unfortunately, they turned it down.

Without any idea of what the password was, it would have to be bruteforced - which wasn’t feasible.