Stefan Thomas forgot the login credentials for a hard drive containing approximately $244 million worth of Bitcoin. The data on the drive will be erased if the wrong password is entered ten times. So far, the programmer has used eight out of ten attempts.
In an open letter dated October 25, Unciphered offered to unlock Thomas’ IronKey hard drive. The team said they have developed a method to hack and access BTC keys. Wired magazine writes that Unciphered was able to access data on a similar IronKey drive after “200 trillion attempts” – apparently bypassing the 10-try limit.
“Although there are always reservations, this is not a theory. We can do it – we’ve done it many times before and we can do it again. You don’t have to take our word for it, we’ll be happy to demonstrate it on as many samples as you need to be sure,” the company said.
Estimates for 2022 suggest that users could lose access to approximately 20% of the BTC supply. Recently, the CEO of Ledger notified owners of the Ledger Nano X hardware crypto wallet about the availability of a wallet recovery solution that involves transferring parts of the seed phrase to third-party holders.
Source: Bits
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