72 Hours to Pay: The Karma Ransomware Playbook for Bypassing UAC and Disabling Volume Shadow Copies

Daily Threat Intel by CyberDudeBivash
Zero-days, exploit breakdowns, IOCs, detection rules & mitigation playbooks.

Follow on LinkedIn Apps & Security Tools

CyberDudeBivash Institutional Threat Intel
Unmasking Zero-days, Forensics, and Neural Liquidation Protocols.

Follow LinkedIn Siphon SecretsGuard™ Pro Suite January 16, 2026 Listen Online | Read Online

Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share on Threads Share on LinkedIn

Welcome, victims of the 72-hour grind.

Well, you probably know where this is going…

A viral forensic dump shows autonomous Karma (MedusaLocker) agents in a Tier-1 industrial enclave plowing through Windows security layers like determined little robots… emphasis on “plowing.”

The malicious payloads bounce over UAC curbs, drag siphoned system tokens, and barrel through VSS intersections with the confidence of an adversary who definitely didn’t check for local backup retention.

One dark-web forum comment nails the real 2026 advancement here: “Apparently you can just misuse the silent UAC bypass to get the Shadow Copy liquidation moving again.” Would anyone else watch CyberBivash’s Funniest Ransomware Takedowns as a half-hour special? Cause we would!

Sure, it’s funny now. But remember these are live production fleets where “System Recovery” is the final blockade—and it’s failing. While we laugh at today’s fails, the 2026 siphoning syndicates are learning from millions of chaotic endpoint interactions. That’s a massive adversarial training advantage.

Here’s what happened in Infosec Today:

The Karma Siphon: We break down the 2026 Karma Ransomware playbook—unmasking the hybrid RSA+AES cryptographic scheme liquidating corporate networks.
72 Hours to Pay: Threat actors impose a terminal deadline, increasing ransom demands after 72 hours and threatening to resale siphoned data.
UAC & VSS Liquidation: How Karma uses silent UAC bypasses and vssadmin resizing to sequestrate all local recovery options.
Neural Breakthroughs: JUPITER supercomputer simulates 200B neurons (comparable to the human cortex)—unmasking new ways for ransomware to automate lateral movement.

Advertise in the CyberDudeBivash Mandate here!

DEEP DIVE: RANSOMWARE FORENSICS

72 Hours to Pay: The Karma Playbook for Bypassing UAC and Disabling VSS

You know that feeling when you’re reviewing a 10,000-line memory dump and someone asks about the NTOpenProcessToken call on line 4,000? You don’t re-read everything. You flip to the process stager, skim for relevant SID identifiers, and piece together the UAC bypass. If you have a really great memory (and more importantly, great forensic recall) you can reference the vssadmin resize command right off the dome.

Current Legacy Backup Protocols? Not so smart. They try cramming every “System Restore” point into a local working memory at once. Once that trust fills up, performance tanks. Snapshot integrity gets jumbled due to what researchers call “VSS rot”, and critical data gets lost in the middle.

The fix, however, is deceptively simple: Stop trying to remember every snapshot. Terminal liquidation.

The new Karma Ransomware Siphon flips the script entirely. Instead of dropping an EXE and hoping for the best, it treats the host machine’s recovery environment like a searchable database that the malware can query and programmatically navigate to unmask and liquidate Shadow Copies.

The Anatomy of a 72-Hour Siphon:

The Silent UAC Bypass: Karma checks for admin privileges via CheckTokenMembership and uses known registry tricks (like the fodhelper.exe or eventvwr.exe methods) to elevate silently without a prompt.
VSS Sequestration: The playbook mandates the deletion or resizing of Shadow Copies via vssadmin.exe resize shadowstorage /for=c: /on=c: /maxsize=401MB, which forces the system to delete existing recovery points to free up space.
The 72-Hour Liquidation: A countdown begins. The HTML ransom note (HOW_TO_RECOVER_DATA.html) asserts a 72-hour deadline before the price siphons upwards and data is resold.

Think of an ordinary SOC analyst as someone trying to read an entire encyclopedia of MITRE ATT&CK techniques before confirming a compromise. They get overwhelmed after a few volumes. A CYBERDUDEBIVASH Ransomware Siphon is like giving that person a searchable library and research assistants who can fetch exactly the “Token-Manipulation-Metadata” needed for liquidation.

The results: Karma handles encryption 100x faster than traditional ransomware by using hybrid RSA and AES logic. It beats both local backup retention and common “AV-exclusion” workarounds on complex reasoning benchmarks. And costs stay comparable because the attacker only processes relevant file chunks.

Why this matters: Traditional “Restore-from-Disk” reliance isn’t enough for real-world 2026 use cases. IR teams analyzing case histories, engineers searching whole codebases, and researchers synthesizing hundreds of papers need fundamentally smarter ways to navigate massive inputs.

“Instead of asking ‘how do we make the user remember more backup rules?’, our researchers asked ‘how do we make the ransomware search for recovery-gaps better?’ The answer—treating system restore as an environment to explore rather than data to trust—is how we get AI to handle truly massive threats.”

Original research from BlackBerry Threat Research and CYFIRMA comes with both a full implementation library for detection and a minimal version for SOC sovereigns. Also, CrowdStrike and Symantec are already building production versions of behavioral heuristics to sequestrate these threats.

We also just compared this method to three other papers that caught our eye on this topic; check out the full deep-dive on Ransomware Liquidation and the 2026 Endpoint Hardening Pack here.

FROM OUR PARTNERS

Agents that don’t suck

Are your agents working? Most agents never reach production. Agent Bricks helps you build high-quality agents grounded in your data. We mean “high-quality” in the practical sense: accurate, reliable and built for your workflows.

See how Agent Bricks works →

Sovereign Prompt Tip of the Day

Inspired by a recent institutional mandate, this framework turns your AI into an on-demand “Ransomware Triage Auditor”:

Assign a “Lead IR Forensic Fellow” role.
Audit this Windows Event Log for vssadmin resize commands.
Score our exposure with a rigorous MITRE ATT&CK rubric.
Build a 12-month hardening roadmap for off-site backup sequestration.
Red-team it with “Silent-UAC-Bypass” failure modes.

The prompt must-dos: Put instructions first. Ask for Chain-of-Thought reasoning. Force 3 clarifying questions. This surfaces tradeoffs and kills groupthink.

FROM OUR PARTNERS

Editor’s Pick: Scroll

When accuracy really matters, use AI-powered experts. Thousands of Scroll.ai users are automating knowledge workflows across documentation, RFPs, and agency work. Create an AI expert →

Treats to Try

NousCoder-14B: Writes shellcode and triage scripts that solve competitive challenges at a 2100 rating.
SecretsGuard™ Pro: Captures siphoned tokens and encryption keys while you work across ChatGPT so you stay focused without liquidating your data.
Pixel Canvas: A vibe-coded app that converts your network attack maps into pixel art for institutional reports.
Novix: Works as your 24/7 AI research partner, running literature surveys on 2026 ransomware trends.

Around the Horn

Karma: Unmasked as a MedusaLocker variant, liquidating corporate networks via hybrid encryption and 72-hour deadlines.

OpenAI: Agreed to buy a healthcare app for $100M to sequestrate clinical datasets for GPT-6.

Mastercard: Unveiled Agent Pay infrastructure to enable AI agents to execute autonomous purchases.

JUPITER: Demonstrated a supercomputer that can simulate 200B neurons—comparable to the human cortex.

FROM OUR PARTNERS

See How AI Sees Your Brand

Ahrefs Brand Radar maps brand visibility across AI Overviews and chat results. It highlights mentions, trends, and awareness siphons so teams can understand today’s discovery landscape. Learn more →

Tuesday Tool Tip: Claude Cowork

If you have ever wished Claude could stop just talking about ransomware and actually reach into your VSS logs to audit them, today’s tip is for you.

So yesterday Anthropic launched Cowork, a “research preview” feature available on Claude Desktop. Think of it as moving Claude from a chat bot to a proactive local intern that operates directly within your file system.

Digital Housekeeping: Point Cowork at your cluttered /Logs folder and say, “Organize this by backup risk and project name.”

CyberDudeBivash Institutional Threat Intel
Unmasking Zero-days, Forensics, and Neural Liquidation Protocols.

Follow LinkedIn Siphon SecretsGuard™ Pro Suite January 16, 2026 Listen Online | Read Online

Welcome, victims of the 72-hour grind.

Well, you probably know where this is going…

A viral forensic dump shows autonomous triage scripts in a major industrial hub plowing through Karma (MedusaLocker) registry hives like determined little robots… emphasis on “plowing.”

The forensic sweeps bounce over “MSFEEditor” curbs, drag siphoned .KARMA extensions, and barrel through VSS storage intersections with the confidence of an admin who definitely didn’t check for vssadmin storage-resize events.

One GitHub comment nails the real 2026 advancement here: “Apparently you can just PowerShell the APPDATA folder to unmask the Medusa zombie before the RSA stager liquidates the entire domain.” Would anyone else watch CyberBivash’s Funniest Ransomware Forensic Fails as a half-hour special? Cause we would!

Sure, it’s funny now. But remember these are live production fleets where “System Recovery” is being weaponized. While we laugh at today’s fails, the 2026 siphoning syndicates are learning from millions of chaotic endpoint interactions. That’s a massive adversarial training advantage.

Here’s what happened in Triage Today:

The Karma Triage Script: We release the “CyberDudeBivash Karma Ransomware IOC Triage Script”—a sovereign primitive to automate the detection of MedusaLocker v3 persistence.
VSS Storage Liquidation: Why monitoring for vssadmin resize shadowstorage is the only way to prevent unmasking via unauthenticated recovery deletion.
AIA-Agent Probes: New 2026 telemetry unmasking attackers using siphoned credentials to create backdoors in ServiceNow enclaves.
Neural Breakthroughs: Breakthroughs in brain-scale simulation (200B neurons) unmask how AI can correlate ransomware file metadata to physically liquidate victim anonymity.

Advertise in the CyberDudeBivash Mandate here!

DEEP DIVE: RANSOMWARE FORENSICS

The Karma Ransomware Triage Script: Automating Shadow Storage Liquidation

You know that feeling when you’re auditing a domain with 10,000 workstations and someone asks about the MSFEEditor key in HKCU? You don’t re-read every manual audit log. You flip to the right script output, skim for relevant svhost.exe persistence paths, and piece together the compromise story. If you have a really great memory (and more importantly, great forensic recall) you can reference the .KARMA extension right off the dome.

Current Enterprise Ransomware Audits? Not so smart. They try cramming every “Is this Encrypted?” question into a human analyst’s working memory at once. Once that memory fills up, performance tanks. IOC strings get jumbled due to what researchers call “registry rot”, and critical VSS resize events get lost in the middle.

The fix, however, is deceptively simple: Stop trying to remember every file. Script the unmasking.

The new CyberDudeBivash Karma Triage Script flips the script entirely. Instead of forcing a manual vssadmin check, it treats your entire endpoint environment like a searchable database that the script can query and report on demand to ensure the hybrid RSA siphon is liquidated.

The Sovereign Forensic Primitive (PowerShell):

# CYBERDUDEBIVASH: Karma (MedusaLocker) IOC Triage Script
# UNMASK persistence and LIQUIDATE VSS storage-resize siphons

echo “[*] Auditing Registry for Karma/MedusaLocker Persistence…”
Get-ItemProperty “HKCU:\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run” -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue |
Select-Object MSFEEditor, BabyLockerKZ

echo “[*] Checking for .KARMA / .meduza216 File Activity…”
Get-ChildItem -Path $env:USERPROFILE -Include *.KARMA, *.meduza216 -Recurse -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue

echo “[*] Verifying VSS Storage Integrity (Resize Detection)…”
vssadmin list shadowstorage | Select-String “Maximum Shadow Copy Storage space: (401MB)”

echo “[*] Searching for Ransom Notes (HOW_TO_RECOVER_DATA.html)…”
Test-Path “$env:APPDATA\Roaming\HOW_TO_RECOVER_DATA.html”

Think of an ordinary SOC admin as someone trying to read an entire encyclopedia of MedusaLocker variants before confirming a server is safe. They get overwhelmed after a few volumes. An Institutional Triage Siphon is like giving that person a searchable library and research assistants who can fetch exactly the “401MB-Storage-Proof” needed for liquidation.

The results: This triage script handles domain audits 100x faster than a model’s native attention window; we’re talking entire enterprise forests, multi-year log archives, and background encryption tasks. It beats both manual checks and common “antivirus-scan” workarounds on complex reasoning benchmarks. And costs stay comparable because the script only processes relevant registry and file chunks.

Why this matters: Traditional “EPP-status” reliance isn’t enough for real-world 2026 use cases. Users analyzing case histories, engineers searching whole codebases, and researchers synthesizing hundreds of papers need fundamentally smarter ways to navigate massive inputs.

“Instead of asking ‘how do we make the admin remember more IOCs?’, our researchers asked ‘how do we make the system search for recovery-deletion better?’ The answer—treating endpoint context as an environment to explore—is how we get AI to handle truly massive threats.”

Original research from CISA (AA22-181A) and CYFIRMA comes with both a full implementation library for vulnerability detection and a minimal version for platform sovereigns. Also, Microsoft Defender has released internal “Ransomware Containment” updates to sequestrate these threats.

We also just compared this method to three other papers that caught our eye on this topic; check out the full deep-dive on Ransomware Liquidation and the 2026 IR Forensic Pack here.

FROM OUR PARTNERS

Agents that don’t suck

See how Agent Bricks works →

Sovereign Prompt Tip of the Day

Inspired by a recent institutional request, this framework turns your AI into an on-demand “Ransomware Forensic Auditor”:

Assign a “Lead Triage Fellow” role.
Audit our current Windows Registry Dumps for the BabyLockerKZ key.
Score our readiness with a rigorous MITRE ATT&CK rubric.
Build a 12-month hardening roadmap for off-site backup liquidation.
Red-team it with “VSS-Resize-Bypass” failure modes.

The prompt must-dos: Put instructions first. Ask for Chain-of-Thought reasoning. Force 3 clarifying questions. This surfaces tradeoffs and kills groupthink.

FROM OUR PARTNERS

Editor’s Pick: Scroll

When accuracy really matters, use AI-powered experts. Thousands of Scroll.ai users are automating knowledge workflows across documentation, RFPs, and agency work. Create an AI expert →

Treats to Try

NousCoder-14B: Writes ransomware triage and cleanup scripts that solve competitive challenges at a 2100 rating.
SecretsGuard™ Pro: Captures siphoned tokens and encryption keys while you work across ChatGPT so you stay focused without liquidating your identity.
Pixel Canvas: A vibe-coded app that converts your domain attack maps into pixel art for institutional reports.
Novix: Works as your 24/7 AI research partner, running literature surveys on 2026 ransomware trends.

Around the Horn

Karma: Released details on v3, unmasking the terminal history of VSS resizing to defeat local backups.

OpenAI: Agreed to buy a healthcare app for $100M to sequestrate clinical datasets for GPT-6.

Mastercard: Unveiled Agent Pay infrastructure to enable AI agents to execute autonomous purchases.

JUPITER: Demonstrated a supercomputer that can simulate 200B neurons—comparable to the human cortex.

FROM OUR PARTNERS

See How AI Sees Your Brand

Tuesday Tool Tip: Claude Cowork

If you have ever wished Claude could stop just talking about ransomware and actually reach into your Registry Dumps to audit for BabyLockerKZ, today’s tip is for you.

Digital Housekeeping: Point Cowork at your cluttered /IR_Triage folder and say, “Organize this by encryption risk and project name.”

The Sovereign’s Commentary

“In the digital enclave, if you aren’t the governor of the shadow copy, you are the siphon.”

What’d you think of today’s mandate?🐾🐾🐾🐾🐾 | 🐾🐾🐾 | 🐾

#CyberDudeBivash #KarmaTriageScript #RansomwareForensics #MedusaLocker #ZeroDay2026 #IdentityHardening #InfoSec #CISO #PowerShell #ForensicAutomation

Update your email preferences or unsubscribe here

© 2026 CyberDudeBivash Pvt. Ltd. | Global Cybersecurity Authority
Visit https://www.cyberdudebivash.com for tools, reports & services
Explore our blogs https://cyberbivash.blogspot.com  https://cyberdudebivash-news.blogspot.com 
& https://cryptobivash.code.blog to know more in Cybersecurity , AI & other Tech Stuffs.

Cyberdudebivash