If only people could take time to actually read it before reacting with simplistic and pre-existing opinions that would be awesome.
he did not "accidentally neuter WannaCry". He stopped WannaCry by registering the kill-switch domain. Nothing accidental about that.
> He is not a master hacker
he is a kid. what makes his experience interesting, and his story worth listening to is that he had first-hand experience with the legal system as a hacker that went too far (because he is/was a kid). that is worth more than the arm-chair analysis of law (by wannabe skript kiddies and theoretical security experts).
https://www.malwaretech.com/2017/05/how-to-accidentally-stop...
- Act as a centralised C2.
- Act as a kill-switch (this is what happened)
- Act as a dead-man-trigger, destroying the host system.
Even if the third option is not as likely as the first one, the repercussions had he been wrong would have been severe.
He didn’t know it was the kill-switch domain, seems pretty accidental to me.
Those who have watched his reverse engineering malware live streams would beg to differ.
He does have a lot of young, inexperienced followers however, who can't tell the difference and are willing to take him at his word.
Hutchins is a media creation. The hype around him and especially his portrayal as a hero is absolute fiction.
It seems like this is exactly what happened:
> On 26 July, 2019, Hutchins was sentenced to time served and one year of supervised release.
The US tax system is a perfect example of this I'd say.
This is a very one-sided article meant to make Hutchins look good.
The valuable bit of the article is a a reminder of why it's important not to start being criminal/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.
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.
The threat of punishment ...?
Your system encourage doing bad things when you are in a position of doing good things.
If I discover a cure for cancer might as well rob a bank and kill my noisy neighbor just before publishing because I'll be pardoned
Hutchins was sentenced to time served
and one year of supervised release.
if this is the only reason not to harm others, then you'll probably look for (and likely find) a way to harm others and avoid punishment.
He was still selling banking trojans the year before, so who knows?
But the charity you setup would shelter your assets better than any prenup or other asset planning (or lack thereof) when you divorce your spouse
So it wouldn't matter what a single judge thought in lower court, if you were compliant.
although personally I think time served and probation seems about right.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/nov/30/narwhal-tusk...
What's more interesting on the "good deed - bad deed" ometer is
> Among those who pinned down the attacker was James Ford, 42, who is also thought to have tried to save the life of a woman who had been stabbed. Ford was jailed for life in 2004 for the murder of 21-year-old Amanda Champion.
The fact that just registering the domain killed WannaCry wasn't expected, but his intent was to kill the virus from the start, that's no accident.
Besides, history tells us that those malwares won't really have such "nuking" functionality. Gating it on the presence of a server is ridiculous, and would be found out eventually when the virus runs in a weird environment where, for instance, every DNS queries resolve (e.g. hotel WiFi).
[1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/kent/3659523.stm