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posted by Fnord666 on Thursday May 14 2020, @08:19PM   Printer-friendly
from the crime-doesn't-pay dept.

The Confessions of Marcus Hutchins, the Hacker Who Saved the Internet (archive)

At 22, he single-handedly put a stop to the worst cyberattack the world had ever seen. Then he was arrested by the FBI. This is his untold story.

[...] For the next few minutes, the agents struck a friendly tone, asking Hutchins about his education and Kryptos Logic, the security firm where he worked. For those minutes, Hutchins allowed himself to believe that perhaps the agents wanted only to learn more about his work on WannaCry, that this was just a particularly aggressive way to get his cooperation into their investigation of that world-shaking cyberattack. Then, 11 minutes into the interview, his interrogators asked him about a program called Kronos.

"Kronos," Hutchins said. "I know that name." And it began to dawn on him, with a sort of numbness, that he was not going home after all.

[...] Despite his sentence of time served, his legal case forced him to overstay his visa, and he's soon likely to be deported back to England. As we walk into Santa Monica, past rows of expensive beach homes, he says his goal is to eventually get back here to LA, which now feels more like home than Devon. "Someday I'd like to be able to live in a house by the ocean like this," he says, "Where I can look out the window and if the waves are good, go right out and surf."

A long, but interesting read.


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  • (Score: 0, Flamebait) by Ethanol-fueled on Thursday May 14 2020, @10:08PM (2 children)

    by Ethanol-fueled (2792) on Thursday May 14 2020, @10:08PM (#994416) Homepage

    " As we walk into Santa Monica, past rows of expensive beach homes, he says his goal is to eventually get back here to LA "

    This fucker deserves whatever he gets. People who enjoy L.A. are a special combination of crazy and stupid.

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Friday May 15 2020, @04:29AM (1 child)

    by bzipitidoo (4388) on Friday May 15 2020, @04:29AM (#994525) Journal

    Hell, the normies have always been suspicious of hackers. The question ain't whether he's on our side, the question is, are we all on the same side? No discrimination? Not against anyone, including hackers and smarty pants?

    That paranoid, conspiracy suspecting thinking can too easily be self-fulfilling. It's often a load of bull anyway, motivated by jealousy, spite, and the desire to bring the hacker down to everyone else's level, not genuine cause to believe he might be a traitor. Treat smart people badly, and they just might flip, like Benedict Arnold did. He was a great military leader, but his superior officers kept screwing him over, out of jealousy and fear of losing their positions to him. The revolutionaries were fighting for freedom and their lives, but somehow these officers still made room for dirty politicking.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 15 2020, @01:59PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 15 2020, @01:59PM (#994617)

      It's /especially/ when they should be united that people are the most opportunistic. Why? You can sell people on crazy ideas that would never fly when ”you're all in it together." The whole situation is literally just giving opportunity to opportunists.