UK Security Researcher Who Stopped WannaCry Outbreak Arrested in US (zdnet.com)

Zack Whittaker, reporting for ZDNet: A security researcher who in May stopped an outbreak of the WannaCry ransomware has been arrested and detained after attending the Def Con conference in Las Vegas. Marcus Hutchins, 23, a British national, was arrested at Las Vegas airport on Wednesday by US Marshals, several close friends confirmed to ZDNet. A friend told ZDNet that he was "was pulled by Marshals at the lounge" after clearing security. He was briefly detained in a federal facility in Nevada until he was moved. "We went to see him this morning and we had already been moved," said the friend. Hutchins is now understood to be in custody at an FBI field office in the state. Motherboard first broke the story on Thursday. Update: A Motherboard reporter tweets, "Here's the indictment accusing @MalwareTechBlog of running the Kronos banking malware."
Update 2: New DOJ statement: Gregory J. Haanstad, United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Wisconsin, announced that on July 11, 2017, following a two-year long investigation, a federal grand jury returned a six-count indictment against Marcus Hutchins, also known as "Malwaretech," for his role in creating and distributing the Kronos banking Trojan.

Comments

WannaCry was an Spook Sponsored Virus

[DatbeDank]

The real reason he was arrested was because the security agencies were using the malware to actively try and discredit Bitcoin by dropping a massive software leak on the entire world. Had more people opted to "pay" the ransom, it would have offered proof to the powers that be that cryptocurrencies are dangerous and convertibility into real fiat should be banned.

Will such proof stop bitcoin? No, but making it more difficult to convert from BTC to fiat will drive the price way down south.

He was arrested because he foiled their plans.

Re:What's what!?

[PPH]

WannaCry was built on top of an NSA exploit that had been leaked. A part of that NSA package was the kill switch that Hutchins discovered and published. He may have had nothing to do with WannaCry's development or propagation. But he caused a TLA to lose one of it's fun toys. And for that, he will be punished.

When agencies get this far out of control, it's time to shut them down.

Re:Loss of revenue

[TechyImmigrant]

Don't they understand? Doing shit like this means we won't have DefCon in the U.S. any longer. Think of the hotels and all the revenue we'll be missing!!! Does Trump know about this?

This is becoming necessary. Similarly for more academic crypto conferences. They split their locations evenly between Europe, Asia and the US which in addition to sharing the travel pain, allows people to avoid countries that might try to prosecute them for being a security researcher. DefCon and BlackHat need to move about so they can be available to researcher that would otherwise be unable to travel there.