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A man forgot the password to a locked USB drive containing over $230 million worth of bitcoin. Now he’s got just two tries left to figure it out or it vanishes forever.
The man, Stefan Thomas, was paid 7,002 bitcoins for creating an animated video in 2011.
Back then, those bitcoins were worth around one dollar apiece.
Today, that cryptocurrency worth around $34,000 each.
That adds up to somewhere in the neighborhood of $238 million. (At one point, those bitcoins were worth nearly half a billion dollars.)
All of that money is now just sitting there on a encrypted IronKey USB drive that he cannot get unlocked. IronKeys are so secure that they are certified for use by military and intelligence agencies for classified information.
Not that he hasn’t tried. In fact, he has attempted to unlock the IronKey drive eight times – all failures.
Now he has just two attempts left before all that money disappears into the ether.
The good news is that an organization of hackers, Unciphered, now believes it can get the drive open for Thomas.
“We were hesitant to reach out to him until we had a full, provable, reliable attack,” Tom Smith (not his real name) recently told Wired. “Now we’re in that place.”
Unciphered even proved to Wired their capabilities when they were sent a encrypted IronKey S200 USB thumb drive and they cracked the password in less than a day.
However, when they reached out to Stefan Thomas to let him know they could assist him in unlocking the $230 million-plus in bitcoin from his IronKey drive, Thomas incredibly told them thanks, but no thanks.
Thomas had already made a “handshake deal” with two other cracking teams a year earlier, he explained. In an effort to prevent the two teams from competing, he had offered each a portion of the proceeds if either one could unlock the drive. And he remains committed, even a year later, to giving those teams more time to work on the problem before he brings in anyone else — even though neither of the teams has shown any sign of pulling off the decryption trick that Unciphered has already accomplished.
“I have already been working with a different set of experts on the recovery so I’m no longer free to negotiate with someone new,” Thomas wrote in an email to Wired. “It’s possible that the current team could decide to subcontract Unciphered if they feel that’s the best option. We’ll have to wait and see.”
“We cracked the IronKey,” Nick Fedoroff, Unciphered’s director of operations, told Wired. “Now we have to crack Stefan. This is turning out to be the hardest part.”