Imagine having access to a Bitcoin wallet worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Sounds incredible, right? Well, a team of cybersecurity experts claims they have cracked the code. The only catch? The owner isn’t interested.
Meet Thomas, the unfortunate owner of this encrypted IronKey hard drive. This device allows only 10 attempts to guess the password before it self-destructs, rendering the fortune of $238,735,990.80 forever out of reach.
Now, this would be a great security measure against malicious hackers. However, it becomes less than ideal when the person trying to access their own money is Thomas himself, a decade later, with absolutely no recollection of the password. And to make matters worse, the amount he’s trying to access is a staggering $240 million. Thomas lost the piece of paper where he had written down his password, and now he’s left with only two attempts before his fortune is lost forever.
But Thomas is not alone in his quest to unlock the wallet. Alongside two teams he hired, cybersecurity experts have been enticed by the challenge, hoping to earn a handsome commission by cracking the code.
Enter Unciphered, a firm specializing in recovering lost cryptocurrency. They claim to have found a solution to crack into decade-old IronKey hard drives. To prove their capability, they had journalist Andy Greenberg set a password, which they successfully retrieved and messaged back to him the following day, as reported by Wired.
Now that Unciphered is confident in their method, they have reached out to Thomas. However, he has declined their help for now, as he already has agreements in place with two other teams working on their own solutions.
“I have already been working with a different set of experts on the recovery, so I’m no longer free to negotiate with someone new,” Thomas explained to Wired. “It’s possible that the current team could decide to subcontract Unciphered if they feel that’s the best option. We’ll have to wait and see.”
[H/T: Wired]
