Cryptocurrency recovery company proposes to crack the Bitcoin hard drive of Ripple's former CTO valued at $244 million.

According to BlockBeats news on October 26, former CTO of Ripple, Stefan Thomas, owns an IronKey hard drive containing 7,002 BTC with only two chances left to guess the password. On October 25, in an open letter, cryptocurrency recovery company Unciphered proposed to unlock Thomas' IronKey hard drive. Its team developed a method to crack the hardware and access the BTC keys securely stored for many years. According to the technology magazine Wired, on October 25, the company was able to access data on similar hardware wallets after "200 trillion attempts" - apparently bypassing the 10-attempt limit on the drive. As previously reported by BlockBeats, on January 14, 2021, former CTO of Ripple Stefan Thomas recently spoke to The New York Times and revealed that forgetting the password to his hardware wallet IronKey could result in the loss of 7,002 bitcoins worth about $260 million today. In 2011, Stefan Thomas was rewarded with 7,002 bitcoins for creating educational videos about Bitcoin when the price was between $2-6. It is reported that the hardware wallet has a total of 10 unlock opportunities, and Stefan Thomas has already attempted 8 times, all of which have ended in failure. According to data from blockchain monitoring company Chainalysis, the number of permanently lost bitcoins is as high as 3.7 million.