Quote:Just a few days after hackers bragged about purportedly raiding the computer systems of the Washington D.C. Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) and doxxing what looked like its data, the Babuk ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) gang prepared a goodbye note saying that they’re hanging up its spurs. 
 
According to BleepingComputer, the message was short, sweet and rapidly blinked out of existence after being up for just a short time. That’s kind of like the gang, actually. The threat group had only been around for a few months before (potentially), now exiting stage left. Unlike the Ziggy ransomware gang during its recent exit, and unfortunately for its victims, the Babuksketeers offered neither apologies nor refunds. 
 
Babuk did, however, promise to pass the torch on to other criminals by open-sourcing the source code for the Babuk file-encrypting malware, saying that it would make it publicly available once it terminated the “project.”

The message, which had been posted for a short time on the main page of the gang’s site, was reportedly tweaked multiple times and was taken down after a short time. But Dmitry Smilyanets of Recorded Future did manage to capture this version of the goodbye letter: twitter

The “PD” referred to in that version of the note is a clear reference to the cybercriminals’ most recent victim: the MPD. On Monday, the gang had posted what they claimed were arrested people’s mug shots and personal details, police reports, and internal memos. The fact that they repeatedly fiddled with the message opens the door to the possibility that the crooks might not be ready quite yet to stop plaguing the world, though. 
 
Specifically, in one version of the message seen by BleepingComputer, there was no reference to “PD.” Instead, there were just asterisks, like the blank spaces left in the template of a form that can be filled in later as need be.