Crypto Asset Recovery Helps Confront Cryptocurrency’s Biggest Fear – Lost Passwords

Cryptocurrencies are becoming more popular as investors become more familiar with them, but there are some fundamental differences when compared to their home currency. The most notable difference is that instead of being based on items of value such as gold or the credit of the country backing it, cryptocurrencies are based on the difficulty of producing them. but this also means that nothing more than an encryption key and password is required.

This means that one of the strengths of cryptocurrencies is the ease of accessing funds. But imagine losing your crypto wallet password and losing access to your funds. This happens much more often than you might think. According to Chris Brooks, CEO and founder of his Crypto Asset Recovery, a company that helps recover passwords, he has two types of digital wallets. The first is a self-custody wallet where “individuals hold their private keys and are essentially protected by encryption and passwords.”The second is a company or organization holding private keys on behalf of a client. The custodian that holds the funds is his wallet. ”

For those with self-managed wallets, losing passwords poses a serious problem. Encryption is basically the original private key. Encrypt long strings of familiar numbers and letters with passwords. If you lose that password, no one can reset it.

However, Crypto Asset Recovery can ask a few questions and generate millions, possibly billions, of password variations based on password guessing. And if any of them are correct, you can decrypt the wallet, grant access, and get the password that opened it.

wallet recovery

“There are two main things to do with wallet recovery,” said Brooks. “The first is a backup of the wallet, which is an encrypted copy of the private key. apply the algorithm.”

Applying a hashtag algorithm, the Crypto Asset Recovery team takes password guesses and feeds them into their own AI program to generate more password guesses. That is, it takes the original password guess provided by the client and extrapolates further guesses based on that. They need to be accurate to get it right and decrypt the wallet.

“The name of our game is widening the key space to attack and using modifiers in hundreds of billions of guesses until we find the right one,” Brooks said. “We see him cracking at a rate of 40,000 to 20,000,000 passwords per second. Even at this speed, you’ll spend 100% of your money finding passwords.”

The company’s combination of strategy and technology means an average success rate of around 50%. It may look small, but it’s not. Without them, wallet owners basically have no chance to access their funds.

The password recovery process actually works for more than encrypted passwords. Whether it’s a digital wallet or one that uses encrypted passwords, Brooks recommends, “People are creatures of habit, so good password hygiene is also important.” . He said it’s important to store and record your passwords in a secure place, such as using a secure password manager, so you don’t lose them in the future and can recover them if necessary. .