The US company says it knows how to recover the contents of the valuable memory stick, but the stick’s Swiss owner doesn’t want to accept help – at least not yet.
- There is a memory stick in the safe deposit box of a Swiss bank, the contents of which are known to be worth 270 million euros.
- The owner of the memory stick has hired hackers to break the stick’s encryption.
- The American company says it knows how to access the contents of the stick.
– Query voltage recurrence, read the editor by Andy Greenberg in the received text message.
These three unrelated English words have no major meaning in themselves, but they made Greenberg cringe.
A few days before receiving said text message, Greenberg— editor of the technology publication Wired – had sent the memory stick to the Seattle company Unciphered.
Greenberg had locked his highly secure Ironkey S200 memory stick with three randomly chosen words and tasked Unciphered with cracking the stick’s security.
To prevent the procedure from being accidentally too easy, the Ironkey S200 is designed in such a way that it destroys all its contents after ten wrong password guesses.
Two trillion false attempts
Greenberg ended up sending his stick to Unciphered’s hackers after hearing about the hacking technique developed by the company. Thanks to it, it is possible to bypass the self-destruction mechanism activated by ten wrong guesses of the Ironkey S200.
After passing the mechanism, breaking into the stick requires either enormous work or fairy-tale luck.
Unciphered’s software ended up needing about two trillion—yes, trillion – an effort to find out the magic words set by Greenberg, query, voltage and recurrence.
The story continues below the picture.
The newer S1000 model Ironkey costs more than 850 euros on Verkkokauppa.com, even though there is only 64 gigabytes of storage space. Ironkey is currently a Kingston brand. Screenshot. Verkkokauppa.com
7,002 bitcoins
It doesn’t matter what the stick Greenberg sent contained. The essential thing is that the stick in question was exactly a ten-year-old Ironkey S200.
A similar Ironkey S200 is lying in the safe of a Swiss bank and belongs to a Swiss cryptocurrency millionaire To Stefan Thomas.
7,002 bitcoins have been deposited on Thomas’ stick, which is worth more than 270 million euros at today’s exchange rates. Unfortunately, Thomas has lost the password for his stick.
His situation is not helped by the fact that he has already tried eight different passwords, which means that there are only two more attempts until the stick destroys its contents.
Two hacker teams already on the hook
A hacker working for Unciphered, who did not want to be named, told Greenberg that they wanted to be 100 percent sure their technology worked before offering help to Thomas.
– Now we are at that point, the hacker stated.
However, no one was prepared for the fact that help would not be accepted. According to Unciphered, they didn’t even get to discuss a possible compensation when Thomas politely declined the help.
Thomas said that he made an agreement to crack the memory stick with two different hacker organizations. To prevent them from fighting each other, Thomas has promised a reward to both groups even if only one of them succeeds in the task.
More than a year has passed since the assignment, and neither team has achieved a breakthrough, according to Wired. Instead, Thomas has again given the hackers more time again and again.
Unciphered posted an “open letter” to Thomas on YouTube last October.
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– Hacking into devices built for information security is difficult. Hacking FIPS 140-2 Level 3 certified devices like your Ironkey is nearly impossible, Uncipheredin Jon Ellch states in the video.
– You have been waiting for this moment for more than a decade. We want to help make that possible. It would be nice to talk to you, CEO Eric Michaud says.
A peculiar situation
Unciphered has found itself in a very strange situation. It has in its hands one of the most valuable tirikets in the world, but no lock to be tirikated.
– We already broke Ironkey. Now we still have to crack Stefan, which has turned out to be the most difficult task, the COO of Unciphered Nick Fedoroff stated to Wired.
Thomas has said that he intends to honor the contract he made. However, he stated that there is nothing preventing the Teams he hires from collaborating with the Seattle company if they deem it necessary.
The story continues below the picture.
A Swiss man has hired hackers to break the security of his memory stick. So far, the help of the American company has not worked. Adobe Stock
Reward for making a video
Thomas received thousands of his bitcoins as a reward for a YouTube video he made in 2011, which was about anything but bitcoin. At that time, one bitcoin was worth less than a dollar.
When bitcoin’s value peaked in 2021, the contents of Thomas’ memory stick were worth about half a billion dollars.
– I just lay in my bed thinking about it. Sometimes I went to the computer and tried to come up with some new strategy to open the stick, and when it didn’t work, I despaired again, Thomas said a couple of years ago for the New York Times.
Memory stick approved for use by agents
Founded in 2021, Unciphered has since helped numerous people access their virtual currencies left on memory sticks and crypto wallets. It says it has saved its customers millions of dollars.
Stefan Thomas’ Ironkey S200 would be by far the most valuable of the Unciphered rescues, not only financially but also for its reputation. Within Unciphered, breaking Ironkey has been called Project Everest.
The development of the Ironkey S200 was once funded by the US Homeland Security Agency. The security of the device is also indicated by the fact that it has been approved for use by various US intelligence services.
The method is not to be sniffed at
Unciphered says that it has successfully tested the method it developed for Ironkey sticks more than a thousand times.
However, the Seattle-based company is not going to reveal how it finally succeeded in circumventing the device’s self-destruct mechanism.
– If this information were to leak from somewhere, it would have far greater implications for national security than cryptocurrency wallets, Fedoroff stated.
Sources: Wired, New York Times