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How Researchers Cracked an 11-Year-Old Password to Access a $3 Million Crypto Wallet
“In the end we were lucky that our parameters and time frame were correct. If any of these were wrong, we would have…continued guessing/framing in the dark,” Grand says in an email to WIRED. “It would have taken much longer to pre-calculate all possible passwords.”
Gran and Bruno created a video to explain the technical details in more depth.
RoboForm, produced by the American Siber Systems, was one of the first password managers on the market it currently has more than 6 million users worldwide, according to a company report. In 2015, Siber appeared to have fixed the RoboForm password manager. With a quick look, Grand and Bruno could find no sign that the pseudo-random number generator in the 2015 version used computer time, which makes them think they removed it to fix the flaw, even though Grand says they would need to look into it more thoroughly to be sure.
Siber Systems confirmed to WIRED that it fixed the issue with version 7.9.14 of RoboForm, released on June 10, 2015, but a spokesperson would not answer questions about how this happened. In a change log The company’s website only mentions that Siber programmers made changes to “increase the randomness of generated passwords,” but it doesn’t say how they did it. Siber spokesperson Simon Davis says “RoboForm 7 was discontinued in 2017.”
Grand says that, without knowing how Siber fixed the issue, attackers may still be able to regenerate passwords generated by versions of RoboForm released before the fix in 2015. He also isn’t sure if current versions contain the issue.
“I’m still not sure I would trust it without knowing how they actually improved password generation in newer versions,” he says. “I’m not sure RoboForm knew how serious this particular weakness was.”
Customers may also still be using passwords generated with early versions of the program before the fix. It doesn’t appear that Siber ever informed customers when it released the fixed version 7.9.14 in 2015 that they should generate new passwords for critical accounts or data. The company did not respond to a question about this.
If Siber didn’t notify customers, it would mean that anyone like Michael who used RoboForm to generate passwords before 2015 (and is still using those passwords) could have vulnerable passwords that hackers can regenerate.
“We know that most people don’t change their passwords unless they’re asked to do so,” Grand says. “Out of 935 passwords in my password manager (not RoboForm), 220 are from 2015 and earlier and most are [for] sites I still use.”
Depending on what the company did to fix the problem in 2015, even newer passwords could be vulnerable.
Last November, Grand and Bruno deducted a percentage of bitcoin from Michael’s account for his work, then gave him the password to access the rest. At the time, bitcoin was worth $38,000 per coin. Michael waited until he got up to $62,000 per coin and sold some of it. He now has 30 BTC, which is now worth $3 million, and is waiting for the value to rise to $100,000 per coin.
Michael says he was lucky to have lost his password years ago because otherwise, he would have sold the bitcoin when it was worth $40,000 a coin and would have lost a larger fortune.
“Losing the password was a good thing financially.”