On many occasions the hackers are the bad guys in the movie, but on this occasion one of them helped an engineer and his friend recover a $2 million dollar fortune that they were about to lose by forgetting something so as simple as your 5-digit PIN.
This story released by Entrepreneur, stars Dan Reich and his friend, who in 1995 invested $50,000 dollars in Theta tokens. Over time, the investment multiplied to $2 million and when they wanted to access the cryptocurrency wallet where they were stored, they did not remember the PIN.
The PIN of a cryptocurrency wallet is difficult to recover , so when someone forgets their password, they can practically write off their digital assets.
After several failed attempts and when they were about to lose their money forever, the investors had to resort to the ingenuity of an experienced hacker.
The friends had their cryptocurrencies in a Trezor One digital wallet, a device the size of a USB memory, where digital currencies can be stored and transacted.
Both had forgotten the five-digit PIN and the problem that arose was that this wallet model only allows 19 unsuccessful attempts before it locks permanently, so after make a mistake 12 Sometimes they sought the help of a professional.
In February of 2021, they managed to contact the American hacker Joe Grand, who has a long history since the 10 years in the world of cyber piracy and even enjoys certain fame, and after a conversation, the friends knew that he was the one to trust him with the risky mission, since if something went wrong they would lose everything.
In a video of Youtube, posted on the account of Joe Grand, the hacker talks about spending three months working in a small laboratory in his family’s backyard, until he managed to develop a technique to hack the Trezor One wallet.
After several attempts and resorting to similar experiences applied by other hackers, Grant remembered the “fault injection method”, to Something he saw at a conference in 2018. This suggests that you can weaken the security of the device’s RAM memory and read the PIN at a precise moment.
Joe developed a technique to hack all the test keys and discover the correct PIN with a automated script. To give it a touch of humor and suspense, he programmed it so that, upon finding the password, it would shout “Hack the planet!”, a phrase quoted in the movie ‘Hackers’ by 1995.
The boys started with the process and after 3 hours and 19 minutes they finally heard: “Hack the planet!”, a sign that the PIN was captured and they finally had the five-digit key that separated them from their millions, the code was 12514.
Immediately, Reich transferred the tokens to a secure account and compensated Grand with a percentage of what was recovered. This story had a happy ending, but the publication recalls that it is estimated that each year more than 3.7 million Bitcoins valued at $50,500 millions of dollars in cryptocurrency wallets lost or blocked.
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