Recovery firm proposes cracking former Ripple CTO's $244M Bitcoin hard drive
Stefan Thomas, the former chief technology officer at Ripple, has an IronKey hard drive containing 7,002 BTC with only two attempts at guessing a password remaining. A company is petitioning former Ripple chief technology officer Stefan Thomas for a hard drive containing more than 7,000 Bitcoin (BTC) that he has been unable to access for years. In an Oct. 25 open letter, crypto recovery firm Unciphered offered to unlock an IronKey hard drive belonging to Thomas containing 7,002 BTC — roughly $244 million at the time of publication. The former Ripple CTO forgot the information to access the drive , designed to erase its data if an individual enters the incorrect password ten times. So far, the German-born programmer has used eight out of his ten attempts. According to Unciphered, its teams developed a method to crack the hardware and access the BTC keys safely stored for years. Technology magazine Wired reported on Oct. 25 that the company was able to access the data on a similar Iro...