BleepingComputer reports that on March 19, the administrator of the Ziggy ransomware announced their plans to return the ransom paid by victims after shutting down their operation on Feb. 6. The administrator published all of the 922 decryption keys the day after the shutdown, which the victims could use to regain access to their files, along with a decryption tool and the source code for an offline decryptor. Victims are advised to contact the administrator at [email protected] and to send their computer ID and proof of bitcoin payment. They will then receive their money through their bitcoin wallet in about two weeks. According to the Ziggy ransomware administrator, they decided to end their operation and refund the victims because they fear of being caught by law enforcement officers. They also claimed to selling their house in order to return the victims' money and planning to become a ransomware hunter after they have refunded the victims.
Jill Aitoro leads editorial for SC Media, and content strategy for parent company CyberRisk Alliance. She 20 years of experience editing and reporting on technology, business and policy.
Several rootkit-like capabilities could be obtained by threat actors through the exploitation of vulnerabilities in Windows' DOS-to-NT path conversion process, including file and process concealment and compromised prefetch file analysis, reports The Hacker News.
Open-source DevOps software project GitLab has also been impacted by the same security issue in GitHub comments that has been exploited by threat actors through Microsoft repository-linked URLs to facilitate the distribution of malware that was made to seem to originate from credible entities' official source code repositories, according to BleepingComputer.