A systems architect cracked a seed phrase and won a 100,000 Satoshi bounty, or 0.001 Bitcoin, worth $29, in just under half an hour. Cointelegraph spoke to Andrew Fraser in Boston, who underscored how critical it is to keep a Bitcoin wallet seed phrase secure and offline. A seed phrase or recovery phrase is a string of random words generated when a wallet is created that can access the wallet, similar to a master key. Fraser brute forced a 12-word seed phrase that Bitcoin educator “Wicked Bitcoin” shared on Twitter. As shown, Wicked’s Tweet challenged users to decipher the correct order of the 12-word seed phrase. “Anyone wants to try and brute force this 12-word seed phrase securing 100,000 sats? I’ll give you all 12 words but in no particular order. Standard derivation path m/84’/0’/0’…no fancy tricks. GL.” It took just 25 minutes to unlock the 100,000 satoshis, worth just under $30. The incident serves as a timely reminder for Bitcoin users and crypto enthusiasts to take crypto security seriously. Fraser cracked the code using BTCrecover, a software application available on GitHub. The software offers a range of tools that can determine seed phrases with missing or scrambled mnemonics and passphrase-cracking utilities.
Full article : What security? Bitcoin enthusiast cracks known 12-word seed phrase in minutes.
