Joe Grand
More info
- Alias
- Kingpin
- Affiliation
- L0pht, Grand Idea Studio
- Known for
- Hardware hacking, DEF CON badges
Hardware hacker and the youngest member of L0pht, who these days breaks into crypto wallets their owners have locked themselves out of.
As a teenager going by Kingpin, Grand belonged to the Boston collective L0pht, and in 1998 he sat alongside Mudge, Weld Pond and the rest before the US Senate as the group explained it could take down the internet in half an hour. He moved on to electronics design and set up Grand Idea Studio.
From 2006 he designed several of DEF CON's electronic badges, turning an admission ticket into a hardware puzzle. His later fame comes from YouTube: in 2022 he coaxed the forgotten PIN out of a Trezor wallet holding about two million dollars in cryptocurrency using voltage glitching — a reminder that physical access usually wins.