The ransomware Maze, Egregor and Sekhmet were up to mischief on the Internet for months. The Trojans took over user systems, tapped the data and then threatened the victims to publish them if they did not pay a specific ransom. In addition to private individuals, large corporations such as Ubisoft, LG or Canon were also among the victims of the scammers.
About a year ago, the developers were arrested by French authorities. Now a user in the BleepingComputer forum who calls himself “Topleak” has published the decryption keys for the three Trojans, as TechCrunch reports.
With the help of the keys, Emsisoft has now published a decryptor. With this, victims can restore their stolen data without having to pay a ransom. The associated download can be found at this address.
Dangerous Trojans: The code of the ransomware was apparently also destroyed
“Topleak” meanwhile stated that it was a planned leak of the Master Keys and that this had nothing to do with the criminal prosecution of the perpetrators. In addition, he assured that none of the Egregor team ever wanted to work with such encryption trojans again. The code of the ransomware has also reportedly been destroyed in the meantime.
One of the ways in which the blackmail Trojans became well known was that printers in the victims’ network were hijacked and the blackmail letters were printed out there without the users being able to do anything about it.
Users who have fallen victim to a ransomware attack can try to defend themselves against it with a number of programs. We have summarized a selection of helpful software variants for you here.