Imagine you had a cryptocurrency wallet with over ten thousand dollars and you forgot your password millions of people all around the world use cryptocurrency to control their finances but many forget their passwords and even throw out their wallets and if you don't have your password all of yourMoney is gone unfortunately that's the problem we're dealing with right now my friend created a crypto wallet six months ago and the password he wrote down is wrong so today I'm gonna try to hack his wallet and recover ten thousand dollars All right Mike tell me what happened about beginning of this year I installed my first Cardona wall on my laptop started getting buggy so I got a new laptop went to set up my Nami wallet again entered in my seed phrase and the seed phrase was wrong in order to hack aCrypto wallet we need to understand how they work crypto wallets use public private key encryption to secure your funds the public key is given to anyone that wants to send money to your wallet while the private key is kept secret and is used to sign transactions when youWant to send money from your wallet hacking someone's private key from their C phrase is normally impossible because guessing one password is hard enough now imagine guessing 24 in a row but luckily we have some significant hints from my friend that I think we can use toPerform the hack so I'm looking at my seed phrase and I wrote it down in four rows of six words so it's a 24 word c phrase and notice that the second and third row both start with the same word this is extremely critical information it means that in order to perform theHack we can replace each of the two words with the word from the 2048 allowable list if I can write a program to automatically replace the words we only need to try 4 million combinations this is enough combinations that my computer can handle easily however weMight have a sneaky problem if my friend secretly messed up a third word we even need to try over a hundred eighty billion combinations in order to hack the seed phrase if that happened my friend's funds are gone let's get coding uh not like that unlike in the moviesCoding is a meticulous process any small tiny detail could go wrong and mess up the entire hat the last thing that I want to happen is to build an entire Solution that's almost correct but just barely misses the Z phrase or skips over the proper word so the hack totallyFails I came up with this code to perform the word replacement let's see it in action I don't return after it does so bamboo that's the word bamboo I think that is the word wait there was that same word twice that was very suspicious all right let's notCelebrate yet let's make sure everything works first because like we could have just hacked someone else's wallet that's unlikely but you know that's a microwave but you know I bamboo that is different than before mine has been created let's see what I've got let me just see where can I see my addressUh it should be under received it's showing me I have no Ada but I definitely should have either any small tiny detail could go wrong and mess up the entire hat you just find like a another one yeah this is a different one are you serious there's there's no transactionsIn it ever yeah this is a major problem we actually found someone else's wallet instead of my friend's one but of course we didn't actually find someone else's wallet what we found was another combination of words that produces a valid wallet but a wallet that no one ever found beforeSince the number of combinations of words in a seed phrase is 2048 to the 24 power is statistically impossible to find someone else's actual wallet but not a potentially valid wallet but just in case let's try another word foreign I think it's capable I now capable sounds right to me too I'm feeling good about this one it's got to be capable it was not capable it's not looking like this one that's I I look even dumber now thinking that was the right word we're gonna try this methodFor about 10 more wallets but unfortunately if those don't work we're gonna have to try a much more complicated method yeah I'm looking like another nothing wow it doesn't look like those words were correct I really thought I could hack the wallet and recover my friend's funds butThere might be something I'm doing wrong because our system is detecting potentially valid wallets it's likely we're gonna find hundreds of false positives as the hack continues when I first started the hack I thought this would be a case of searching for a needle in a haystack if I searched longEnough I'm gonna find it but now it's turned into a situation where there's dozens of Haystacks and hundreds of needles and only one with the Golden Needle alright here's the plan unlike Bitcoin cardano supports non-fungible tokens or nfts non-fungible tokens are cryptographically secure tokens that areGuaranteed to be unique a lot of people attach images to them and that's where the right-click save meme came from but it turns out if we know that an nft exists in someone's wallet we can query the cardano blockchain to find the address that the nft exists at since weKnow some of the nfts in my friend's wallet we just need to look them up on the Cardinal blockchain and voila we found my friend's address we're in a good position because you've only ever used one address on this wallet if we Loop through all these words and it doesFind this wallet then we'll know for a fact this is correct now that we know the public address we're searching for we're going to use a double loop on the two duplicate words what this means is we start with the first duplicate word and replace it with the first word inThe crypto word list we then replace the second duplicate word with each of the 2048 words in the crypto word list until we find a match if we don't find a match we go back to the first duplicate word and replace it with the second word inThe crypto word list and repeat the process again this will result in our computer trying over 4 million combinations this algorithm is slow but if any of the two duplicate words are actually incorrect we will find out here's the code for this attempt let's see if it works foreign Wow this is unbelievable it looks like those two duplicate words might actually be correct with this information we can deduce that there's at least one other incorrect word in the seed breaks in order to find it we're going to attempt one final hack this final hack will haveTwo stages the first stage is US replacing each of the 24 words in the seed phrase with words from the crypto word list if only a single word is incorrect we're going to find it the second stage is the exact same as the first stage but we also replace theDuplicate words with words from the crypto word list this way we can determine if one of the duplicate words end another word in the seed phrase are both incorrect this is our final attempt if this fails my friends funds are gone forever Here's the final code for the hack let's hope this worksForeign I know what happened so instead of the word stick you put the word sick I'm so happy we were able to recover the wallet from my friend make sure to subscribe see ya