Cryptocurrency recovery company Unciphered has offered to help former Ripple CTO Stefan Thomas unlock an IronKey hard drive containing 7,002 Bitcoin worth $244 million at current prices.
Thomas infamously forgot the password to access the drive, which has a limit of 10 incorrect attempts before the data is erased. So far, he has tried unsuccessfully 8 times to unlock the wallet.
Keypoints
- Cryptocurrency recovery firm Unciphered has offered to help former Ripple CTO Stefan Thomas recover 7,002 Bitcoin worth $244 million locked in an IronKey hard drive.
- Thomas forgot the password to unlock the drive and has already made 8 unsuccessful attempts to access it. He has only 2 attempts left before the drive erases all data.
- Unciphered claims they can bypass the 10-attempt limit through an exploit and have successfully unlocked similar IronKey drives before.
- Wired magazine testified that Unciphered helped them recover data from a locked IronKey drive after “200 trillion tries.”
- Unciphered wrote an open letter to Thomas offering to recover the Bitcoin, but did not disclose their fees.
In an open letter, Unciphered claimed they can bypass the attempt limit by exploiting a vulnerability in the IronKey wallet’s design. The firm says they have successfully cracked similar drives in the past through reverse engineering and cryptanalysis.
Unciphered’s claim is backed up by tech magazine Wired, who reported the firm unlocked one of their test IronKey devices after “200 trillion tries.”
The recovery company has not disclosed potential fees but says they have the technical and legal means to help Thomas regain access to his long lost Bitcoin fortune.
Thomas has not yet indicated if he will accept Unciphered’s offer with his last two password attempts. But the rising value of Bitcoin seems to have renewed interest in recovering inaccessible crypto wallets, of which an estimated 29% of the Bitcoin supply may be lost forever.
