Currely, another team is working on this issue. Stephen Thomas was awarded 7002 Bitcoins for helping an exchange about a decade ago. He produced an animated video for the exchange to iroduce their growing digital currency. This programmer stored his digital currencies in a USB with strong encryption and wrote down his password on a piece of paper. This type of USB is known as an IronKey drive. As you might have guessed, the paper was lost and the digital currency has since been blocked.
There is a problem that makes the situation worse. IronKey has a mechanism that allows you to eer the password only 10 times. If you exceed this limit, all its coes will be lost. Thomas told the New York Times in 2021 that he only had 2 more chances. The story does not end here and takes a strange path.
At that time, a team of hackers and cryptographers used Unciphered to solve this problem. Unciphered can unlock locked drivers. They started working on IronKey devices similar to Project Everest and Thomas in early 2023.
But they found problems and noticed that parts of the code looked messy or weren’t written ideally. They bought an example of that old machine and used advanced technology like a CT scanner to reverse engineer the drive. The group was finally able to create a complete 3D model. In July, this work was completed and the group was able to read the encrypted coes of the IronKey drive.
Eric Michaud (CEO of Unciphered) announced: “We have now reached Everest.”
Since then, the team has decrypted IronKey devices more than a thousand times. The group’s actions were non-destructive and were shown to Wired three times. You might think that the group’s success would have made Thomas wa to trade with them and gain access to his bitcoins. But the matter did not go like this.
According to Wired, Unciphered reached out to Thomas and offered him the job. But Thomas politely rejected their offer. Thomas emailed the group and announced that he is currely working with a variety of specialists. Therefore, he cannot negotiate with someone else.
“The curre team may wa to subcoract with Unciphered to speed things up,” he announced. We have to wait and see what happens.”
It is clear that Thomas does not have financial problems. In 2021, he announced in an article to the New York Times that he was able to buy enough bitcoins and store their passwords. These bitcoins can give him more wealth.
With a value of $34,300 per bitcoin, Thomas’ locked remittance is worth more than $240 million as of this writing.
Source: techspot
nn
