Since Bitcoins became known, many technology lovers bought their respective cryptocurrencies. Some did it for fashion, others for gambling, and the most visionary, as a real investment. Whatever the case, the increase in value of these cryptographic tokens made many become millionaires. It was unfortunate to lose the password to digital wallets. This happened to a man in 2013 who, After several years and the help of a renowned hacker, he managed to become a millionaire.
Michael, a German who bought bitcoins in 2013, faced a desperate situation after He stored his cryptocurrencies in a digital wallet with a password that he later lost.At that time, he used Roboform, a password generator, to obtain his own password, which he stored in an encrypted text file. Unfortunately, the file became corrupted and he lost his password forever. And with it, his bitcoins.
“At that moment I thought, ‘ok, shit, about two thousand euros…’ well, you just get angry,” Michael, who uses a fictitious name to protect his identity, told a local outlet.
Over the years, the price of bitcoin began to rise. In 2024, his portfolio was worth about €3 million, or around $3.37 million..
“I have this fortune, I can see it, but I can’t use it because I don’t have the password,” he said. It was like winning the lottery and losing the ticket.
To recover his password, he turned to Joe Grand, a hacker known as Kingpin.On his YouTube channel, Grand had already shared how he recovered other passwords in complex processes.
At first, Grand refusedbecause he comments that “all possible combinations are more than 100 trillion times the number of drops of water in the entire world.” It could be a drop falling from the sky, q. Given this, Michael considered bequeathing his portfolio to his son, hoping that more advanced technology would help him recover his profits.
Two of Grand’s most recent successes prompted Michael to contact him. At one point, he retrieved a wallet from a man who threw it into a lake; in another instance, he retrieved a password from a young man who, on his deathbed, told his brother that he believed the key had something to do with his grandmother’s name.
“The only solution is to reduce that insurmountable amount to something we can be successful with.”Grand explained to El País, when he justified why he initially rejected Michael’s request.
After Michael’s insistence, Grand, with the help of Bruno, another young software hacker, discovered that the way Roboform’s various versions had changed over the years could help them achieve new career success.
For the new 2015 version, the company wrote this new feature: “Increases the randomness of generated passwords.” So, Grand wondered if in 2013, When Michael created his password, they weren’t really random.If so, the odds against it were reduced.
So they investigated Roboform’s code to find out how it generated the passwords. After hours of work to identify the algorithm, they discovered that They could create the same password twice.
“We could trick the system and travel back to 2013 to generate the passwords in the time window in which we believed Michael had generated his password,” Grand shared.
Narrowing things down, they found that Roboform’s password generation depended on when they were created. So, Michael just had to remember the approximate day in 2013 when he created his password and price parameters, such as number of characters, lowercase, uppercase, and special keys.
With this discovery, Grand and Bruno confirmed that people who used Roboform were potentially vulnerable to having their passwords stolen. In Michael’s case, it gave them a chance to get her back..
By the fall of 2023, Grand and Bruno arrived in Barcelona, where Michal was spending a few days, to give him a check that said “$1.6 million,” the value of his bitcoins at the time.
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