- Hacker Joe Grand helped Troops Inc co-founder Dan Reich hack his trezor wallet and recover $2 million worth of Theta token.
- Dan Reich invested $50k in the Theta token back in 2017 when it was worth $0.25.
- Currently the Theta token has $2.9 dollars a unit.
For those people who are more active in the world of digital assets, they will surely be familiar with the fact that, unlike other platforms such as Gmail, Facebook or TikTok, wallet users must have their passwords stored on physical paper, files to those who can resort, or have a very good memory to have them at hand, since, if they forget it, they will not be able to access their money again, since the wallets do not store them.
This is the case of a CEO who lost his passwords and almost lost a lot of money by forgetting it.
CEO loses his passwords to millionaire wallet
Dan Reich, co-founder of the firm Troops Inc., four years ago he made a $50 thousand dollar investment in the Theta token together with one of his friends. At the time, the crypto currency had a low value, only reaching $0.21 when the pair of friends decided to invest their money in it.
The boys were pleasantly surprised when, after two years of having invested their money, the cryptocurrency began to rise in value at the end of 2020. The asset grew so much that it managed to reach an all-time high of $15.90 in almost a year. and a half later, in April 2021, with which, the initial investment of $50 thousand dollars, became more than $3.5 million dollars.
Everything was joy and emotion, until they realized that neither of them remembered the pin to access the wallet or the recovery phrase. It was at that moment that happiness turned into horror at the thought that they had lost so much money because of an oversight.
After searching and searching and realizing that they did not have such a password, they began a frantic search to find a hacker to help them recover the 5-digit PIN, which they thought was four.
Relentless search
In their arduous search, they almost lost hope, after having consulted various and diverse hackers who simply refused to do the job, while others considered the operation too risky.
They had faith that they would find someone with the necessary skills to pull off the feat, especially since Reich watched a conference from 2018, the same year they invested the money, in which three engineers successfully hacked into a Trezor wallet from what he knew. that “it was possible”.
Hacking Trezor
After a long search, fate brought them to Joe Grand, and Reich immediately knew that he would surely be the only person who could help them get their money back.
Grand is an expert in engineering and also in hacking, since he started doing this activity when he was only 10 years old.
Regarding how he performs his “digital magic” worthy of contests like Got Talent, Grand pointed out that the method to be able to access almost any wallet (known as the glitch injection method), he learned from a 15-year-old hacker named Saleem Rashid, who had previously successfully recovered $30,000 worth of Bitcoin in 2017 using just this technique.
To document his success, Grand decided to upload a video to YouTube in which he explained the entire process of achieving PIN recovery.
“It is a high-risk operation, but possible, since, if we manage to detect the chip at the right moment, it will be possible to bypass the security and recover the information we are looking for”.
In this regard, the hacker indicated that his main objective was to recover the PIN and the phrase from the RAM memory. However, he had to be very meticulous and do it with the pulse of a surgeon, since, if something went wrong, the PIN would disappear forever and with it the possibility of recovering the more than $3.5 million stored.
“Basically, the operation consists of causing an inappropriate behavior in the silicon chip with the aim of bypassing security.d”, indicated the hacker. “When carrying out my plan to recover the money, I realized that I had the possibility to defeat the security, access the private information, then the “recovery seed”, and finally and as a miracle, the PIN I was looking for appeared in front of my eyes on the screen”.
Thus, after successfully testing his attack plan on three identical wallets, Grand was able to read the PIN and the recovery phrase, which led Reich to make $2 million, after giving him a percentage of the Theta tokens. to Grand as a reward.
Trezor responds to hack
Joe Gran documented the hacking process through a video on YouTube. This video was answered by the signature Trezor and pointed out that this is a deprecated exploit which is not a concern for current users since in 2017 they fixed this issue right after a report they received through their responsible disclosure program.
“This attack requires full physical access to the device, and there is no record of compromised funds.Trezor pointed out.
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