Herstel van gestolen cryptocurrency: hoe DriveSavers een Trezor-seedzin met 10 ontbrekende woorden reconstrueerde

De gedrukte Trezor-herstelkaart zelf bood een betrouwbaar referentiepunt en verkleinde het aantal mogelijke kandidaten per woordpositie van 1.024 naar ongeveer 200, op basis van de tekenlengte.

To interpret the limited hand motion visible in the video, the team asked the client for separate handwriting samples. The client’s way of forming letters proved distinctive. Certain letters were written top to bottom, others bottom to top. One had a preliminary loop that wasn’t part of the letter itself. Another had a shape closer to a lightning bolt than a typical curve.

For positions where partial hand motion was visible, engineers used these patterns to eliminate incompatible candidates from the SLIP-0039 word list. Identifying Word 11, combined with accelerated hardware, reduced the remaining brute-force estimate from 803 trillion years to 33 years. Word 13 reduced it further to 59 days. By Word 15, the remaining combinations were within computational reach.

Word 16 introduced a critical ambiguity. The Trezor recovery card showed 8 character boxes for that position, but the video suggested the client had written only 6. Because SLIP-0039 words are fixed, using the wrong character length would eliminate the correct answer entirely. The team worked through the evidence and concluded the real word was most likely 6 characters. Two of the marks on the backup paper had likely smudged into each other, creating the appearance of additional characters.

Rather than relying on a single uncertain assumption, the team locked in only high-confidence constraints and allowed the recovery software to evaluate the remaining valid candidates.

At this stage, the remaining uncertainty was small enough to make computation viable. With the high-confidence words locked in and the remaining pool narrowed, DriveSavers proprietary cryptocurrency recovery software executed the final brute-force effort at 28 billion guesses per second. The correct seed phrase was identified in 5 hours, enabling successful wallet recovery.

From there, the wallet was restored on replacement hardware and the cryptocurrency was transferred to a secure wallet before the thieves could act.

Most cryptocurrency losses stem from a handful of scenarios: a stolen wallet, a partial seed phrase, a forgotten password, a corrupted wallet file, or a physically damaged storage device. Some of these scenarios are recoverable. Others are not. Each depends on the specific failure conditions.

DriveSavers crypto recovery experts handle partial and damaged seed phrases, lost crypto wallet passwords, corrupted wallet.dat files, hardware wallet PIN recovery, and physical damage to storage media containing wallet data. The approach shown in this case combined forensic video analysis and proprietary recovery software. That combination fits a specific and uncommon set of circumstances for crypto asset recovery.