'Rescued' three million USD in Bitcoin from locked wallets 10 years ago
Hacker Joe Grand and his colleagues recovered the password of an e-wallet containing 43.6 BTC, equivalent to nearly 3 million USD, from 2013.
According to Wired, hacker Joe Grand and his colleagues successfully recovered users' Bitcoin wallets by exploiting vulnerabilities in the RoboForm password manager, which was used to create secure passwords a decade ago.
In 2022, the owner of an e-wallet with 43.6 Bitcoin discovered he could not access his account. This man who nicknamed himself Michael in Europe contacted Joe Grand but only received a shake of the head.
Grand, nicknamed Kingpin, refused most people who approached him with offers related to unlocking cryptocurrency wallets. This hacker's main job is to advise system developers to help them prevent hackers from breaking in. He became famous after restoring a hardware wallet in 2022, but Michael uses a software wallet, meaning that previous experience can hardly be used.
Michael persistently approached again a year later and Grand decided to give it a try. He called Bruno, a German colleague, to get started.
Michael created a complex password using the RoboForm manager and encrypted it using TrueCrypt. However, the file containing the encrypted password was later corrupted and there was no backup. Michael also does not save passwords in RoboForm for fear that his computer could be hacked.
After months of analysis, Grand's team wrote software that ran RoboForm's process backwards and discovered vulnerabilities in the random code generator it used in 2013.
