This article is inspired by my other article on cracking /etc/shadow hashes with
John the Ripper. I’ve seen some people asking about a hot topic these days,
bitcoin wallet recovery. You’ve heard the story, someone has xyz number of BTC
in their wallet and blah you lost the private key! Here I will show you how to
recover that.
You will need John from the Jumbo branch
on GitHub. The old school John does not support bitcoin as a format.
I’m using a Linux (Ubuntu) computer, preferably use one with as many cores as you can find or reasonably afford to rent.
Note: that all the “=” signs are important and must be used for correct syntax.
Formatting
Just to get an idea. First though, we have to conver it into the correct
format.
The Crack
We’ll then take the string that is interpreted out of bitcoin2john.py, and load
it into john…
Conclusion
So we’ve found our encryption password for the wallet and can now access the funds!
Depending on the size of your wordlist and complexity of the password, this can take a very long time. Also Please only use this method
on your own wallet.dat files! I hope you are able to now recover your wallet.dat password.
If you felt so inclined, you could couple this article with my other on stealing wallet.dat files over Tor to really get your hands dirty…