Project: EVEREST - Cracking the IronKey
In January of 2021, the New York Times published an article called “Lost Passwords Lock Millionaires Out of Their Bitcoin Fortunes”, detailing:
“Stefan Thomas, a German-born programmer living in San Francisco, has two guesses left to figure out a password that is worth, as of this week, about $220 million.
The password will let him unlock a small hard drive, known as an IronKey, which contains the private keys to a digital wallet that holds 7,002 Bitcoin.”
Here at Unciphered, we perform Advanced Cryptocurrency Recovery. That means that we go beyond password brute-forcing. Way beyond. When we read this article, we saw an “Advanced Cryptocurrency Recovery” challenge, so we decided to make it our mission to summit this mountain.
After a year of work involving cryptographers, reverse engineers, hardware experts and advanced mathematicians, we are proud to announce that we’ve succeeded. Unciphered has not only discovered attacks against all versions of the AT98 based IronKey — we developed an extremely reliable one that with most configurations allows us to take the password guessing entirely offline. We’ve repeated our attack thousands of times on dozens of devices without fail and proven it to the press and industry colleagues.
Today we’ve announced to the world in Wired that we’ve reached the summit of our Everest. You can read more about the journey here: https://www.wired.com/story/unciphered-ironkey-password-cracking-bitcoin/
If you have cryptocurrency locked up on an IronKey that you can’t access, Unciphered can help. Get in touch with us here - https://www.unciphered.com/letsgo
Media Inquiries:
Ed Zitron
530-794-8766
