I just read a story about a German guy, who forgot the password to his encrypted hard drive. The drive contains 7002 BTC, which is worth over 250 million USD. He only has 2 attempts left to guess the password or the Bitcoin will be lost forever. You can read more about this unfortunate guy right over here.
This and similar stories have come up all the time in the last years and they show one of the largest "problems" of cryptocurrencies. In this modern age we are used to having a "Forgot Password" button, which we can just click in case we don't remember our password. Cryptocurrencies on the other hand are secured by private keys / passwords, which are usually shown only once when creating a new wallet and there is no way of restoring them, if you loose your backup or forget the password. People however tend to not store their password / private key in a secure place.
A similar thing happened to myself when I first got into cryptocurrencies in 2014. I started earning a few Satoshis every day using Bitcoin faucets. Back then I seem to have created a new Bitcoin wallet without any backup and when I switched my computer I probably forgot to copy it over. Fortunately in my case it is only a total of 40 bucks I lost and not 250 million. You can find my "forever lost" Bitcoin under the address 1vjhoaHgFtecgDNB8wtm4fepNUA9wBfy9.
Like what I am doing? Please consider voting for me as a witness. To do so visit https://wallet.hive.blog/~witnesses, find my name towards the bottom of the list and vote or use Hivesigner to vote for me.
Given physical access to the device and a vague idea of what sort of password would have been used any encryption scheme from 5+ years ago can be cracked by a reasonable number of latest model top end GPUs.
With physical access many copies can be made of the encrypted contents and then even a vague idea of the sort of password used will reduce possibilities from thousands of years to thousands of hours.
With that much BTC it is worth investing in the best cracking tech.
The IronKey USB-drive uses AES-256, which is not so easy to crack, except if you have a pretty good idea what the password looks like. Otherwhise brute-forcing would be infeasible I would say. Or which technique did you mean exactly to crack the encryption?
But it is definitely worth investing some time, with that many BTC on it and if it takes a few years, Bitcoin will just be worth more anyways ;)
!gif cracking
Worth this guy investing in a 7 full PCI slot motherboard and 7 x RXT3090s.
https://gcfrng.com/2020/10/14/the-nvidia-geforce-rtx-3090-is-very-good-at-cracking-passwords-and-thats-bad-news/
He must have some idea of the sort of password he used. If he knows it is dictionary words plus some personal data he can crack it.
Even with AES-256.
Only if he used a completely randomised string that he then falied to record would it not be recoverable using present tech.
But hold onto that Hard Drive because tech improves all the time.
Via Tenor