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.
