A Bitcoin wallet containing $3 million was finally accessed after 11 years due to the owner forgetting the password. Imagine the joy of stumbling upon a long-lost $10 bill—then multiply that by millions. This was the thrill experienced by a man who finally regained access to his Bitcoin fortune after over a decade.
The anonymous owner reached out to Joe Grand, an electrical engineer known as “Kingpin,” for help hacking into an encrypted file with 43.6 BTC. To secure his crypto, the owner had used a random password generator called RoboForm but eventually lost track of the password.
Concerned about possible security risks if someone else accessed his computer, the owner turned to Grand, who had previously helped a client recover over $2 million worth of crypto in 2022. Although many seek his help, Grand chose to assist this specific owner.
In a YouTube video, the wallet owner explained, “I generated the password, saved it in the wallet’s passphrase, and also stored it in an encrypted text file.” When access was lost, the Bitcoin was worth around $3,000–$4,000, but with Bitcoin’s price surging over 20,000%, he decided to enlist Grand’s expertise.
Grand used a tool developed by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) to analyze RoboForm’s code. “Ideally, a password generator produces a unique, random output each time,” he explained, “but this older version allowed us to manipulate the time to predict the password.”
By adjusting the time settings back to 2013, when the password was created, Grand and his colleague Bruno recreated millions of possible passwords, ultimately cracking the code. Speaking to Wired, Grand credited their success to a mix of skill and luck.
“We were fortunate that our parameters and timing were accurate. If either had been off, we’d have been guessing in the dark,” Grand wrote in an email.