A man in Europe recently recovered nearly $3 million in Bitcoin after thinking his password was lost forever.
The anonymous man, dubbed “Michael,” hired a team of security researchers who were able to unlock his Bitcoin wallet and retrieve 43.6 Bitcoin, as reported by Wired.
In 2013, Michael created a password using a generator called Roboform that consisted of 20 upper- and lower-case letters and numbers. Due to security concerns, Michael kept the password in an encrypted file instead of storing it with RoboForm.
When the encrypted file got corrupted, however, Michael lost access to the 20-character password required to access the 43.6 Bitcoin in the wallet.
Michael lost hope of recovering the password and his Bitcoin, but in 2022, he convinced electrical engineer Joe Grand to try to help. Grand, who goes by the hacker handle ‘Kingpin,’ explained in a video that he and his colleague exploited a long-fixed vulnerability in the RoboForm password generator.
At the time Michael created his password, the generator associated each code with the specific date and time of its creation on the user’s computer. Grand and his team used this flaw to solve the problem. (Roboform says the issue was resolved in 2015, but it might have impacted passwords created prior to that, Wired reported.)
Michael couldn’t tell exactly when he created the password, but the team found out that he moved Bitcoin to his wallet on April 13, 2013. Last November, they adjusted the parameters on the password generator so it would behave as if it was certain dates around that timeframe — until it generated the correct code, which was created on May 15, 2013.
The price of Bitcoin has skyrocketed since Michael lost the password. In April 2013, Bitcoin was $140 per coin, and now it is hovering around $68,000. He says that had he had access to his wallet, he would have sold the cryptocurrency when it reached $40,000 a coin. “That I lost the password was financially a good thing,” he told Wired.
Grand and his team received a portion of the Bitcoin as a reward, and Michael sold some of it at $62,000 per coin. He now owns 30 Bitcoin worth $2 million and wants to sell the rest when it reaches $100,000 per coin. Not bad for what once looked like a lost cause.