A cryptocurrency wallet, containing 69,370 BTC (about $690 million), appeared for sale on the popular hacker forum RaidForums. This was highlighted by Hudson Rock’s chief technology officer Alon Gal.
Get this — there is a Bitcoin wallet with 69,000 Bitcoins ($693,207,618) that is being passed around between hackers/crackers for the past 2 years for the purpose of cracking the password, no success so far.
I have the wallet, @Google hook me up with a quantum computer please. pic.twitter.com/GcIqH7kN98
— Alon Gal (Under the Breach) (@UnderTheBreach) September 8, 2020
The wallet ranks seventh in the world by Bitcoin holdings. Hackers have been trying to crack it for years without success and have even put it up for sale more than once, Gal notes.
On July 29, 2019, the wallet was sold on the Bitcointalk forum, and earlier this year on the All Private Keys site.
However, there is no guarantee that the wallet.dat file actually contains bitcoins. According to Wallet Recovery Services head Dave Bitcoin, hackers could have forged the wallet so that it preserved the address but had a different private key.
There are also methods that could give the wallet the appearance of a high balance, adds the expert:
“You can edit the file in a binary editor and swap the public key of one address pair for the public key of a Bitcoin wallet with a high balance.”
Other experts doubt that the wallet can be hacked at all. They contend that the wallet.dat file is encrypted with AES-256-CBC and SHA-512, and cracking these would require a huge amount of time.
Earlier in June, the well-known Bitcoin investor Alistair Milne lost 1 BTC in a hacker attack, which he himself initiated. The aim of the experiment was to determine what volume of wallet data would be sufficient to crack.
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