Recovery Firm Suggests Hacking Ex-Ripple CTO’s $244M Bitcoin Hard Drive

A company is claiming a hard drive containing more than 7,000 Bitcoin (BTC) that it has been unable to access for years to former Ripple Chief Technology Officer Stefan Thomas.

In an Oct. 25 letter, crypto recovery firm Unciphered offered to unlock an IronKey hard drive belonging to Thomas that contained 7,002 BTC — an estimated $244 million at the time of publication. The former Chief Technology Officer of Ripple forgot the information to access the drive designed to delete the data if an individual enters the wrong password ten times. So far, the German-born programmer has used eight out of ten tests.

According to Unciphered, the teams have developed a method to crack the hardware and access the BTC keys stored over the years. The technology magazine Wired reported on October 25 that the company was able to access the data on the same IronKey after “200 trillion attempts” – apparently exceeding the 10-trial limit on the driver.

“Although there are always warnings, this is not the theory,” said Unciphered. “We can do it; we've done it many times before. […] And we can do it again. You don't have to take our word for it […] We're happy to show you in a series of samples what it takes to feel confident before you move forward.

This is a letter to Stefan Thomas (@justmoon) – we'd love to help you get back into IronKey. pic.twitter.com/1hYg3h79BF

— Unciphered LLC (@uncipheredLLC) October 25, 2023

Eric Michaud, CEO of Unciphered, told Cointelegraph that the company got the information on IronKey from the Wired report by extracting some of the car's data and using an offline server to give the team more than one bite to guess the password. The company declined to say what it would ask in return from Thomas, but Unciphered has created a “sustainable business” that helps people recover crypto.

“If Stefan doesn't want to work with us, we're prepared, but we're hopeful,” Michaud said. “We have a growing business now and we'll be here when it's ready.”

Related: Ledger Hardware Wallet Releases Cloud-Based Private Key Recovery Tool

There are many well-known stories like Thomas's about recovery or users not being able to find their keys for one reason or another. In the year In 2021, a Redditor claimed to have regained access to 127 BTC over a decade after finding private keys on an old computer. In the year In 2013, British national James Howells mistakenly disposed of a hard drive containing approximately 7,500 BTC – making several unsuccessful attempts to find and locate the drive in the trash.

In the year Estimates suggest that by 2022, users may lose access to approximately 20% of the Bitcoin supply. This was a cryptocurrency worth billions of dollars.

Magazine: How to protect your crypto in a volatile market: Bitcoin OGs and experts weigh in.