Joe Grand: The Hacker Who Got Back Bitcoin After a Decade

Joe Grand—you might know him as "Kingpin"—just pulled off something pretty incredible. He cracked open a Bitcoin wallet that sat locked away for over ten years.

The owner had stashed away 43.6 BTC. Locked it up tight with a RoboForm password. Then couldn't get back in. Ouch.

Grand gets asked to help with stuff like this all the time. Most requests? He ignores them. This one seemed different though. A real puzzle.

The password situation was weird. The owner used what looked like some jumbled-up characters for both the wallet and an encrypted text file. No way to remember it. No way to guess it.

But here's the interesting part. Grand figured something out about RoboForm. Those old versions? Not so random after all. Their "random" passwords followed patterns. They were tied to system time. Kind of surprising when you think about it.

So Grand went to work. He dug into his toolkit—some fancy stuff originally built by NSA spooks. The password generator had flaws. "These RoboForm passwords look random," Grand said after cracking it. "They're not. The older versions let us manipulate time settings. That gave us the password."

Grand's been around the block. Used to roll with the L0pht Heavy Industries crew. Started Grand Idea Studio too. The guy designs DEF CON badges and teaches people about hardware vulnerabilities. He's even documented ways to extract crypto from hardware wallets by messing with voltage. Serious skills.