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Anyone who's been on the receiving side of a ransomware attack can tell you they didn't have a good day. But what if that day was terrible for not just the victim, but also the attacker? Thanks to a coding bug, that's precisely the case with a variant of ransomware from the Nitrogen group that encrypts target data and literally tosses away the key, rendering the data completely unrecoverable .
The exact ransomware in question is Nitrogen's VMware ESXi variant, which targets hypervisors (virtual machine host servers) and presumably encrypts the virtual machines residing therein. Hypervisor attacks aren't new, and existing analysis shows that while sysadmins are generally good at deploying endpoint protection on hosted operating systems, they sometimes have lax policies regarding hypervisors.
What this ultimately means for victims hit by this particular strain is that they need not pay the ransom the group demands, as no one will be able to decrypt the data. The only course of action available is to fetch the latest backups. Should those not exist, the only option left is probably grief counseling.
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Key considerations
- Investor positioning can change fast
- Volatility remains possible near catalysts
- Macro rates and liquidity can dominate flows
Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/cyber-security/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/cyber-security/nitrogen-ransomware-programmers-lock-themselves-out-of-a-payment-key-management-bug-encrypts-victims-data-forever#main
- https://www.tomshardware.com
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