Manage to hack a wallet with 2 million dollars in cryptocurrencies because they had forgotten the PIN

What started out as a game in 2018 turned into a horror movie years later when two friends saw their initial investment reach $2 million. A forgotten PIN code is to blame and a hacker is the solution.

In early 2018, Dan Reich and a friend decided to spend $50,000 worth of bitcoin on a batch of Theta tokens, a new cryptocurrency that was only worth 21 cents each at the time. Because the exchange headquarters was in China and major government crackdowns on cryptocurrencies were expected, They decided to move the investment to a wallet (Trezor).

After setting up a PIN and spending some time, they decided it was a good time to sell it and recoup the profits. But nevertheless, none of them remembered the PIN. The problem came when at that time the price skyrocketed and their profits began to skyrocket until they became millionaires.

Here in when they really panic and look for the solution to decipher the PIN of their wallet to be able to withdraw all the money. After attending a talk on how to do it, they knew it was possible. “At least we knew it was possible and had some directional idea of ​​how it could be done”, says Reich.

COVID and lockdowns put a damper on your plans in 2020, but in February 2021, with the value of its tokens now at $2.5 millionReich was making plans to fly to Europe, when they suddenly found a better option: a hardware hacker in America named Joe Grand.

Grand is an electrical engineer and inventor who has been hacking hardware since he was 10 years old. Known by the nickname the Kingpin, he was part of the notorious L0pht hacker collective that, in 1998, testified before the US Senate about a vulnerability that could be used to bring down the Internet or allow an intelligence agency to spy on traffic.

“If he messed up, there was a good chance he couldn’t recover,” dice rich.

However, finally and after several hours of decoding, managed to access the account and get all your money back. Reich and his friend were now $2 million richer and a portion of the loot went to Grand.

Nowadays Grand is dedicated, with his great skills, not only to crack wallets, but to make them more secure. Think inform the vendor of any vulnerabilities you find when they are patchable, so they cannot be exploited by criminals or others who might take over an owner’s wallet.

“It depends on the design, but with enough time, effort, and resources, anything is hackable.”, he points out.

Trezor, for its part, has already fixed part of the problem that Grand exploited in later versions of its firmware.