The owner of the Bitcoin wallet remained anonymous. He stored his cryptocurrency in that wallet, secured by a password he had randomly generated using a password generator, RoboForm. The password was kept in an encrypted file. Unfortunately, the owner lost the password after the encrypted part of his computer that held it became corrupted.
Although the value of a Bitcoin was only a few thousand dollars at that time, it had risen more than 20,000% since 2013. He had seen his value in the wallet cross over to be more than $3 million. The increase in value realized with his Bitcoin was just tempting him to get access to his wallet.
The owner reached out to Joe Grand, an electrical engineer who goes by the handle ‘Kingpin’ online. Grand was known in the community for helping another crypto owner recover access to over $2 million in cryptocurrency. The owner asked Grand for his help after he became known for this.
A team of security researchers, led by electrical engineer Joe Grand started working to hack into an encrypted file holding 43.6 BTC.
Grand used a tool developed by the US National Security Agency (NSA) to disassemble the password generator’s code. He discovered that while RoboForm’s passwords appear to be randomly generated, they’re not. With the older versions of this software, if the time could be controlled, the password could be controlled. Grand tricked the system by changing the time back to 2013 when the password was created. After a few failed attempts, it ultimately led to the same password being recreated. Grand and Bruno generated millions of potential passwords, and eventually, they were able to crack the code.
