Lost Password Locks Man Out of $7.4 Million in Bitcoin – Until a Hacker Cracked the Code

A European man, referred to only as Michael, had his life turned upside down after forgetting the password to his crypto wallet—one that held a staggering 43.6 Bitcoin, worth around AU$7.4 million at today’s market rates.

Back in 2013, Michael used RoboForm, a password generator, to create a secure login and saved it using TrueCrypt, a disk encryption tool. But fate took a turn when the TrueCrypt file became corrupted, locking him out of his digital fortune.

Like many in his situation, Michael reached out to cryptography experts, only to be told that recovering the password was virtually impossible due to the complexity of the encryption and the lack of any recovery backup.

Still desperate, Michael turned to someone with a history of pulling off the impossible—Joe Grand, a well-known hardware hacker from the US. Grand had previously helped recover $3.2 million in Bitcoin for another investor, so hopes were cautiously high.

Initially, Grand considered brute force, a method that uses automated scripts to test millions of password combinations. But the complexity and length of Michael’s password made brute-forcing a non-starter. “We’d need an impractical amount of time and computing power,” Grand noted.

Instead, the breakthrough came when Grand examined RoboForm’s older versions. He discovered a potential flaw: the program might generate passwords influenced by the computer's system time and date when the password was created.

The problem? Michael had no memory of when the password was actually generated.

Based on the transfer date of the Bitcoin wallet—14 April 2013—Grand and Michael made an educated guess. They began recreating passwords using similar parameters (20 characters, upper/lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols), spanning from 1 March to 20 April 2013. All attempts failed.

They widened the range to 1 June, still no success.

But a deeper look into Michael’s past password habits revealed a key detail—his other RoboForm-generated passwords didn’t contain special characters. So they re-ran the password generation, this time excluding symbols.

Bingo.

The working password had been created on 15 May 2013, and it unlocked the wallet containing all 43.6 Bitcoin.

“We got lucky,” Grand admitted. “If we’d misjudged the date range or the password pattern, we’d have been stuck in the dark forever.”

This case is a stark reminder of the risks associated with self-custody in crypto. While Bitcoin offers unprecedented freedom and decentralisation, it also comes with a high level of personal responsibility. One forgotten password, and millions could be gone—unless a white-hat hacker like Grand comes to the rescue.

Michael, now reunited with his crypto fortune, remains anonymous. But his story will likely go down in crypto folklore as a tale of luck, perseverance, and the power of ethical hacking.

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