The group appears to have completed dealings with all its victims, apart from two whose data has only been partially leaked as can be seen in the screenshot within this article.

The announcement comes as no surprise, given that the website Bleeping Computer, which focuses on ransomware, reported on 29 October that Maze would be pulling down the shutters.

The operators claimed that any reports about their collaborating with other group were all made up.

Anyone who wanted private information to be deleted from the Maze website was asked to contact the group via chat.

The last two leaks, for which the Maze group has not fully released data, are seen on the group's website on the dark web. Supplied

The Maze group was the first to steal data from sites before encrypting the victim's files on-site. It has been a very successful strategy with one analyst, Chester Wisniewski of Sophos. saying the ransom demands appeared to have increased after the introduction of this tactic.

He told iTWire in response to a query associated with another topic that as one set of attackers had moved to very high ransom demands, most of them had also moved into extortion over disclosure of stolen data to try to apply additional pressure on victims.

Notable attacks this year which used Maze have been on the world's second largest memory chip maker SK hynix. global technology firm Pitney Bowes, Texas foundry group X-FAB, a Thai power authority, the Belgian accounting firm HLB, the global defence group ST Engineering and the Sydney strata management company Strata Plus.

Others who were attacked with the same ransomware were South Korean electronics giant LG, the Thai Beverage Public Company, Japanese multinational optical and imaging products vendor Canon and Indian sweets maker Haldiram's.