Hardware hacker Joe Grand and his team successfully retrieved $3 million worth of Bitcoin from a software wallet locked since 2013. Grand, known for his hardware hacking skills, and his software hacker friend Bruno, reverse-engineered a password generator to unlock the wallet.

The wallet’s owner, Michael, initially approached Grand after seeing a video of him hacking a hardware wallet. Michael had used RoboForm to create a secure 20-character password, saved in an encrypted file that became corrupted. Grand and Bruno initially declined the project due to the complexity of brute-forcing such a password but reconsidered a year later after Bruno's work on another password generator.

They attacked the RoboForm program itself, finding that older versions had vulnerabilities in their randomness generation. Using tools like Cheat Engine and Ghidra, they identified the code responsible for generating the password and discovered that system time influenced the generated passwords. By manipulating time values, they could reproduce the same password multiple times.

After facing numerous challenges, they adjusted their approach based on revised parameters excluding special characters. Within minutes of running the updated code, they generated the correct password and accessed Michael's Bitcoin. This success underscored the importance of secure random number generation in cryptographic applications and showcased the power of combining hardware and software hacking expertise.

Grand’s work highlights the need to rotate passwords generated before specific software upgrades and demonstrates the collaborative potential in cybersecurity. His YouTube channel features various methods for recovering lost Bitcoin and crypto from devices like Ledger and Trezor.