A newly identified ransomware strain is accidentally destroying the very files it's supposed to hold for ransom. And for the victims who end up paying, they're getting nothing back. Cybersecurity firm Check Point Research published findings Tuesday detailing the dangers of VECT 2.0, a Ransomware-as-a-Service operation that first emerged on a Russian-language cybercrime forum in 2025. The ransomware contains a critical coding flaw that permanently destroys any file larger than 128 kilobytes rather than encrypting it. That threshold is smaller than a typical email attachment, meaning virtually every file that would matter to a victim — databases, backups, virtual machine disks, documents, spreadsheets — is being irreversibly wiped rather than locked. In plain terms, when VECT scrambles a file, it needs to save a cryptographic nonce  — a kind of secret code — that later allows it to unscramble the file. Mashable Light Speed For larger files, the malware generates four of these codes.…