Security News > 2022 > March > Conti Ransomware source code leaked by Ukrainian researcher
A Ukrainian researcher continues to deal devastating blows to the Conti ransomware operation, leaking further internal conversations, as well as the source for their ransomware, administrative panels, and more.
On Monday, the researcher kept leaking more damaging Conti data, including an additional 148 JSON files containing 107,000 internal messages since June 2020, which is around when the Conti ransomware operation was first launched.
A part of the leak that got people excited was a password-protected archive containing the source code for the Conti ransomware encryptor, decryptor, and builder.
While the leaker did not share the password publicly, another researcher soon cracked it, allowing everyone access to the source code for the Conti ransomware malware files.
As we saw when the HiddenTear and Babuk ransomware source code was released, threat actors quickly coopt the code to launch their own operations.
With code as tight and clean as the Conti ransomware operation, we should expect other threat actors to attempt to launch their own criminal operations using the leaked source code.