Researchers crack 11-year-old password, recover $3 million in bitcoin

boem@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 455 points –
Researchers crack 11-year-old password, recover $3 million in bitcoin
arstechnica.com
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It is luck(?) for him the password generator isn't secure back then.

The password auto generated by his software wallet used the date/time as the "random" seed for the password, so knowing the rough date he created it they were able to get it to spit out the same password again. So not very secure at all.

A little too "pseudo" and not enough "random." :)

It all depends on the value of what you're trying to secure, and if an attacker knows the value of what's in the account, and if the attacker has access to hints about the password you used to narrow down the possibilities. The researchers knew all of that info and they still didn't want to bother trying to crack the password until they found an additional way to narrow down the possibilities even further.

There's no such thing as perfect security. A lock only needs to be strong enough to make it not worth breaking into for what's in there