By now you’ve probably heard of ransomware. It’s a form of malware that encrypts your files and demands a payment for the decryption keys. The whole concept of ransomware says a lot about humans, huh? It says we’re quite clever but we’re also basically dicks.

Last week a new strain of human dickishness was unleashed on an unsuspecting public. Locker is a form of ransomware known as a sleeper. That’s a variant that lies dormant until the administrator wakes it up. Last week the alarm rang. The program rolled out of bed and encrypted files on thousands of PCs.

Now this week an internet user who claims to be the author apologized for that whole making-your-life-suck thing. To prove his sincerity, he released this statement on PasteBin:

I am the author of the Locker ransomware and I’m very sorry about that has happened. It was never my intention to release this.

I uploaded the database to mega.co.nz containing ‘bitcoin address, public key, private key’ as CSV. This is a dump of the complete database and most of the keys weren’t even used. All distribution of new keys has been stopped.

He went on to say that automatic decryption will begin today. If your files are already borked by this program, then I suppose you don’t have much choice but to trust the author. Try to decrypt the files with the keys he provided. If that fails, make sure your computer is connected to the internet so you can receive the task signal.