Akira is one of the most dangerous ransomware responses floating on the internet and just met the game – an Indonesian programmer with cloud computing and pure determination.
As Techspot first reported, Yohanes Nugroho successfully cracked Akira, a multi-platform ransomware that has been causing damage since 2023. Cyber criminals are used to target hundreds of businesses, government agencies and industrial companies, and Akira has helped its developers make millions.
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While this is not the first time someone has found a way to break Akira encryption, the situation is striking that Nugroho did it alone and in just 10 hours. TechSpot has full failures, but here is the fast version:
Mixable light speed
Amateur programmer Nugroho has built a decryptor to use GPU Power to crack Akira ransomware, similar to content that fuels high-end gaming graphics. He found that Akira’s encryption key was based on the exact moment of the attack, until nanoseconds, making the keys for each file unique.
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To make decryption more difficult, the ransomware pieced together these keys through a 1,500-round hash and locked them with RSA-4096 encryption. Often, this is nearly impossible to break, but the GPU can run millions of calculations quickly.
Nugroho took a break when his friend provided the log file from the attack, helping him estimate the time it took to crack the encryption. His RTX 3060 isn’t fast enough to 60 million guesses per second, even the RTX 3090 doesn’t cut it. So he turned to cloud services Runpod and Vast.AI, renting a 16 RTX 4090 GPU-done the job in just 10 hours.
Brute-Force tools can be used on GITHUB, and Nugroho encourages GPU experts to further improve and optimize.
