Slashdot Mirror
UK Tabloids Doxxed the 'Hero' Hacker Who Stopped a Global Cyberattack (theoutline.com)
The UK-based security researcher, who "accidentally" halted the spread of the ransomware Wanna Decryptor over the weekend, has been doxxed by UK tabloids. From a report: [...] Journalists have published his name against his will, bringing him unwanted attention and sending a signal to privacy-sensitive researchers that no good deed goes unpunished. The researcher, writing under the username MalwareTechBlog, published a blog post on his personal site with findings about the virus, explaining how it was stopped and what would have to be done to prevent it from coming back. News outlets, including the Daily Mail, The Guardian, and CNN called the anonymous researcher a hero. The researcher was initially responsive to press inquiries. He told reporters that he was 22, lived in the south of England with his parents, and worked for an L.A. security firm. However, he told The Guardian that he wanted to remain anonymous "because it just doesn't make sense to give out my personal information, obviously we're working against bad guys and they're not going to be happy about this." It took about a day for UK papers, including The Mail, The Sun, The Telegraph, and The Mirror, to suss out the researcher's name and publish photos of him, show up at his house, and track down his friends and associates for interviews. "It's caused a fair bit of stress," he told Forbes. "I don't want fame."
The UK press are twats.
Security Researchers have had death threats and setups, like having hard drugs posted to their house shortly followed by a tip off to plod and all manner of other nasty things.
Sadly it's not just Murdoch's sewerage - the other papers are just as bad.
Why can't women be like Hedy Lamarr - beautiful, talented and inventors of frequency-hopping spread-spectrum techn
> Liberals respect privacy, by the way.
Like when Gawker had a Hulk Hogan sex tape, that kind of privacy?
Neither liberals nor conservatives give a shit about privacy. We've had unopposed Democrats in Congress, and currently have unopposed Republicans. No one passed any fucking privacy laws. No one is going to.
Is mass media all owned and narrative controlled by the same two or three elite oligarchs really "a free press?" The answer is that no, it is something else entirely.
The Sun. The Daily Mail. The Mirror. The only thing worse than them is Julius Streicher's Der Stürmer. Thanks, Rupert Murdoch, for the daily garbage.
You have not read his blog. He specializes in malware tracking, detection, new malware analysis and the like. He has been writing nearly two articles per month since he was 18 and has a job doing similar work at 22. A very accomplished, if a bit overspecialized, young man precisely in the field we are discussing.
These are the same type of reporters that hacked the voicemail of a missing girl and then deleted some of the saved voicemails in the hope she'd get more which convinced the police she was still alive and caused the investigation to be suspended for a couple weeks. British tabloids are the ones leading the charge into a world with no journalism, respect or privacy.