Nitrogen Ransomware Recovery: ESXi Bug Means Paying Cannot Help
Nitrogen has been active since 2023 and is built from the leaked Conti 2 ransomware builder. ransomware.live counts about 50 victim claims, with new posts in October 2026.
In February 2026 Coveware published an analysis of Nitrogen's VMware ESXi encryptor. A coding mistake makes another value in memory overwrite part of the public key before it is used, so files are encrypted with a damaged key. That damaged key was never derived from a private key, so no matching private key exists. Bitdefender and Veeam reported the same finding: for ESXi victims, the decryptor the attackers sell cannot work.
Do not pay for an ESXi decryptor
If your ESXi hosts were hit by Nitrogen, paying the ransom will not return the virtual machines. That makes two things decisive: whether clean backups exist, and how much of each virtual disk the encryptor actually overwrote.
Nitrogen ransomware data recovery: what we recover
We measure exactly which regions of each encrypted VMDK were overwritten. Where the encryptor left parts of the virtual disks unencrypted, as many encryptors do on large files to save time, we rebuild the file systems, SQL Server and Oracle databases and files inside the virtual machines from those parts. Veeam backup files on the same network are examined the same way.
Do not reinstall the ESXi hosts or reformat the datastores. Copy the encrypted VMDK files and contact us for a free assessment. No data, no charge.
Veeam backups, SQL Server or Oracle databases encrypted by Nitrogen?
Ransomware groups go after the backup repository first. A .vbk or .vib file renamed by the ransomware is often not lost: large backup files are usually only partly encrypted, and the intact blocks can be verified and rebuilt into the virtual disks. The same holds for SQL Server MDF and BAK files and for Oracle datafiles and Data Pump exports: the rows the ransomware did not reach can be read directly. In real cases we rebuilt a 466 GB server disk from a 43 GB Akira-encrypted VBK, and recovered 98.8% of the rows from LockBit-encrypted SQL Server backups.
- Ransomware-encrypted Veeam VBK recovery →
- AS VBK Recovery Studio: free analysis of an encrypted VBK →
- Ransomware-encrypted SQL Server database recovery →
- AS SQL Recovery & Repair Studio: free analysis of an encrypted MDF or BAK →
- Ransomware-encrypted Oracle database recovery →
- NAS and RAID ransomware recovery →
- Ransomware-encrypted VMware VMDK recovery →
Nitrogen ransomware data recovery: contact us now
We have already solved 656+ ransomware and data recovery cases: encrypted and corrupted SQL Server, Oracle and MySQL databases, Tally, Busy and Marg ERP data, Veeam backups, VMware and Hyper-V virtual machines, RAID and NAS. Send us the details and we tell you what we can recover.
- ✓ Free assessment before you pay anything
- ✓ No data, no charge
- ✓ NDA on request
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