One of the downfalls of crypto is the costliness of user errors. If someone loses the keys to their crypto wallet, they could lose access to their crypto holdings forever. Luckily for them, there’s a growing cottage industry of wallet recovery services, a breed of crypto dark-arts practitioners to help recover lost funds. Currently, the most popular method is known as “brute-forcing,” where the recovery specialists use a cryptographic technique that involves bombarding the wallet with as many passwords as possible, in hope of eventually guessing the right one.
But there’s a new trend in the crypto safecracking that’s more akin to finding a secret entryway. Unciphered, a wallet recovery service founded in 2021 and based in San Francisco, targets poor implementation of wallets by looking at software and cryptography vulnerabilities. The latest instance emerged Friday when it was revealed that Unciphered hacked the popular OneKey hardware wallet earlier this year by extracting a private key through exploiting a vulnerability in the firmware – the embedded programming that provides machine instructions. OneKey disclosed the vulnerability in a statement, acknowledged Unciphered’s role in detecting the vulnerability and said it had quickly fixed the issue.
Full story : Hacking Crypto Wallets Is Latest Strategy in Quest to Recover Lost Billions.
