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MP Matt Poto On CyberWire Daily

“Anything over 200 megabytes was written with just random data so that it would effectively destroy them. And then they put up a ransom note that just says your files have been encrypted and we don't want anything. Your files have been destroyed forever.”

CyberWire Daily · Software Engineering & Infra · November 2026

“Anything over 200 megabytes was written with just random data so that it would effectively destroy them. And then they put up a ransom note that just says your files have been encrypted and we don't want anything. Your files have been destroyed forever.” — Matt Poto, CyberWire Daily

Context

Matt Poto walks through the ransomware hidden in a fake GTA 6 installer. It encrypts small files and overwrites large ones, so it acts as a wiper with no way to pay for recovery.

Transcript

CyberWire Daily Around 06:05 into the episode
Matt Poto

Yep, you got it.

Dave Bittner

Take us through that.

Matt Poto

Sure. So chaos is, again, another known ransomware variant. This one specifically, it would, you know, when you install it, it would find files that were smaller than 200 megabytes and it would create a password and it would encrypt them with that password, each file having its own unique password. Anything over 200 megabytes was written with just random data so that it would effectively destroy them. And then they put up a ransom note that just says your files have been encrypted and we don't want anything. Your files have been destroyed forever.

Dave Bittner

So no opportunity to pay some more money and get the files back.

Matt Poto

Yep. Yeah. This specific variant I found was just trying to inflict maximum damage, it seems.

Dave Bittner

Wow. Now, one of the interesting details is that the installer also drops the Yandex browser. Why do you suppose that was included as well?

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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