The dreaded Akira ransomware attack has had another hole blown through its hull. Blogger Tinyhack has discovered a new exploit to brute-force the virus's encryption and has reportedly already used it to restore the data of an attacked company. Akira, a well-known ransomware cyberattack, may now be escapable by affected companies thanks to a GPU-based brute-force counterattack. With an RTX 4090, the Tinyhack found they could crack the encrypted ransomware'd files in seven days, and with 16 GPUs, the process would take just over ten hours.
Akira is a ransomware attack aimed at high-profile targets, first discovered in 2023 and known for ludicrously high ransom requests (sometimes reaching tens of millions of dollars). In 2023, Avast's Threat Research Team found the method Akira used to encrypt victim files, and published a free encryption breaker tool to free computers from the dreaded attack. Akira then patched this high-profile crack, adding some bespoke details to its originally publicly-available encryption methods.
