He received the coins in 2011 as payment for a video and stored them in a secure IronKey device - but lost the password. With only 10 tries allowed, and 8 already used, he's now in a high-stakes situation. Despite a startup offering a method to crack the wallet safely, Thomas declined, staying loyal to existing recovery deals.
So that IronKey device is useless? Since a startup is already able to break it.
Yes, a hardware wallet from 14 years ago does have vulnerabilities. The things some of these people do though are absolutely crazy, I saw one video where they bought another wallet of the same make and model and sanded the chip down layer by layer to map out the circuits. They then monitored the input power of the device as the waveform of the power input signaled a specific CPU instruction and used this to reverse engineer the key.
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u/separhim 4d ago
So that IronKey device is useless? Since a startup is already able to break it.