Confessions of Marcus Hutchins, the hacker who stopped the WannaCry attack

Marcus - thanks for stopping WannaCry. Be well.

It's a long piece, and quite interesting. Thanks for sharing @Malwaretech.

It's interesting to see how trusting another criminal with your address opens you up to serious blackmail... maybe I should set up a PO Box for Bitcoin business :)

I cringed when it came to describing how he'd try to tell the FBI half truth. Even if they hadn't had enough evidence to get him for his involvement in the Kronos malware, they'd still throw the lying to a Fed charge at him.

Why wouldn’t the wannacry malware writers register the domain first? Should be possible to simply update the name servers or dns records should the kill switch need to be engaged?

This was a long and yet one of the most interesting reads from WIRED I have seen in a long time.

If you fellow HN&#x27;ers feel as compelled to thank Marcus as much as I did, I recommend supporting his Patreon:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.patreon.com&#x2F;MalwareTech&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.patreon.com&#x2F;MalwareTech&#x2F;</a>

Ah that explains his tweet this morning

This is a bit over the top. He is not a master hacker who &quot;saved the Internet&quot;; He <i>accidentally</i> neutered WannaCry by registering a domain he found in the binary, which as it turned out, acted as a kill switch.

cybersecurity professionals are the closest things to superheroes we have

Hutchins was busted for committing bank fraud. Him doing one good thing does not absolve him of having committed another crime...he&#x27;s still a criminal. Rather than protest him being arrested we should advocate for him getting a reduced sentence for having at least done some good.

Security is about control. Shame on the malware writers for having left a single point of failure.

Title was intentionally misleading before mods updated it.<p>This is a very one-sided article meant to make Hutchins look good.<p>The valuable bit of the article is a a reminder of why it&#x27;s important not to start being criminal&#x2F;evil, because it traps you in a postive-feedvack loop of criminality as you feel a need to commit ever-greater criminal acts to cover up past acts.<p>The only escape from this is to create a culture where criminals know that it safer to turn themselves in and turn informant on their co-conspirators, than to try to evade the authorities.