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posted by Fnord666 on Sunday July 14 2019, @07:37PM   Printer-friendly
from the lucky-pothole dept.

Submitted via IRC for AnonymousLuser

The sinkhole that saved the internet

It was late afternoon on May 12, 2017. Two exhausted security researchers could barely unpack the events of what had just happened.

Marcus Hutchins and Jamie Hankins, who were working from their homes in the U.K. for Los Angeles-based cybersecurity company Kryptos Logic, had just stopped a global cyberattack dead in its tracks. Hours earlier, WannaCry ransomware began to spread like wildfire, encrypting systems and crippling businesses and transport hubs across Europe. It was the first time in a decade a computer worm began attacking computers on a massive scale. The U.K.’s National Health Service (NHS) was one of the biggest organizations hit, forcing doctors to turn patients away and emergency rooms to close.

Hours after the disruption began to break on broadcast news networks, Hutchins — who at the time was only known by his online handle @MalwareTech — became an “accidental hero” for inadvertently stopping the cyberattack by registering a web domain found in the malware’s code.

The internet, still reeling from the damage, had gotten off lightly. The two researchers, at the time both in their early 20s, had saved the internet from a powerful nation-state attack launched by an enemy using hacking tools developed by the West.

But the attack was far from over.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 15 2019, @01:48AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 15 2019, @01:48AM (#867038)

    ...on May 12, 2017.

    ...at the time both in their early 20s,

    So two years later, they are still in their early or mid 20s. WTF?

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by kazzie on Monday July 15 2019, @06:22AM

    by kazzie (5309) Subscriber Badge on Monday July 15 2019, @06:22AM (#867091)

    It'll make more sense to people who read the article in a decade or so.