Hackers Finally Recover $3 Million Bitcoin Wallet After Man Lost His Password In 2013

A team of hackers recently managed to unlock a $3 million Bitcoin wallet that a man had been unable to access for 11 years due to a forgotten password.

Forgetting a password can definitely be annoying, but usually, it's not a huge deal.

However, losing access to a Bitcoin wallet worth a staggering $3 million?

That's a whole different level of frustration.

Pexels/Karolina Grabowska

Luckily, a group of security experts stepped in and were able to crack the password, finally freeing up the huge sum of money that had been locked away for over a decade.

The person called in for the job was Joe Grand, an electrical engineer known online as 'Kingpin.'

He was tasked with breaking into an encrypted file that contained 43.6 BTC.

The Bitcoin, quite valuable, was safeguarded by a password that was generated by a tool called Roboform, a random password generator, but unfortunately, that password was lost.

The wallet's owner was quite concerned that someone might hack his computer and steal the password, thus gaining access to his digital fortune. 

YouTube / Joe Grand

"At [that] time, I was really paranoid with my security," he mentioned.

After hearing about Grand's success in helping another crypto owner recover over $2 million in lost cryptocurrency in 2022, the wallet's owner decided to reach out for help.

Grand shared that he's been approached by dozens of people asking for help with their lost digital treasures.

While he turned many down for various reasons, he chose to take on this particular challenge.

In a YouTube video that Grand posted, the wallet's owner explained his process: 

You'd want to make sure you'd never forgotten the password to a $3 million wallet Getty Stock Photo

"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 the owner first lost access, the Bitcoin's value was somewhere between $3,000 and $4,000.

But with the cryptocurrency's price having skyrocketed by more than 20,000 percent, the stakes were much higher, prompting him to contact Grand.

Grand utilized a tool originally developed by the US National Security Agency (NSA) to break down the password generator's code.

He explained: "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.

Joe Grand to the rescue. YouTube / Joe Grand

"[But] in this version of RoboForm, it was not the case. 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."

By resetting the time to 2013, when the password was first created, Grand made several attempts that ultimately recreated the original password.

Working alongside his colleague Bruno, Grand generated millions of potential passwords.

Finally, he cracked the code, which he later described to Wired as being 'ultimately lucky.'

YouTube viewers had a field day with this story.

One commented, "Moral of the story: Use insecure password generators."

Another joked, "That password generator really just generated a password for every second of time lmao."

Yet another quipped, "Password generator… You had one job!"

A different user concluded, "Moral of the story: Don’t attack the password, attack the system that created the password."

When Joe Grand finally breached the crypto wallet, he told Wired on a Tuesday (May 28):

"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."