Researcher retrieves $300,000 worth of Bitcoin from an encrypted Zip file

Researcher retrieves $300,000 worth of Bitcoin from an encrypted Zip file

A Russian investor locked $300,000 worth of Bitcoin after forgetting the encrypted Zip file’s password but an ace cryptoanalyst unlocked the encrypted zip file to retrieve funds.

 

It can only be termed a tragedy if you own thousands of Bitcoin yet cannot access it because you saved them in a password-protected ZIP file, and later forgot the password.


The person who recently faced this tragedy is a Russian investor, who reportedly bought Bitcoin worth $1.5 million back in 2016, before the historic rate hike of cryptocurrencies in 2017. The unidentified investor cannot access the cryptocurrency because he cannot remember the password’s encrypted keys.


Michael Stay, Pyrofex Corp’s CTO and Google’s former security engineer, narrated the story at the DEFCON virtual event. Michael Stay was a crypto-analyst and reverse engineer in the 1990s and worked for Google for around six years.


According to Stay, the investor, whom he referred to as “The Guy” locked his crypto wallet containing roughly $300,000 in bitcoins. The investor sought Stay’s help in recovering the locked crypto since Stay had published an article around two decades back in which he discussed the technique to hack encrypted ZIP files.


See: Man who threw away $121m of Bitcoin wants to dig up a landfill site


The Russian investor contacted Stay via LinkedIn in October 2019, in which he asked him to help in retrieving the password.



“If we find the password successfully, I will thank (;”, the investor wrote to Stay.

 

Stay found it to b ..

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