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Researcher Who Stopped WannaCry Pleads Not Guilty to Creating Banking Malware (vice.com)
Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, reporting for Motherboard: Monday, the well-known security researcher who became famous after helping to stop the destructive WannaCry ransomware outbreak pleaded "not guilty" to creating software that would later become banking malware. Marcus Hutchins -- better known by his online nickname MalwareTech -- was arrested in early August in Las Vegas after the hacking conference Def Con. The US government accuses Hutchins of writing software in 2014 that would later become the banking malware Kronos. After getting out on bail and traveling to Milwaukee, he stood in front a judge on Monday for his arraignment. Prosecutors also allege he helped a still unknown co-defendant market and sell Kronos. Hutchins's lawyer Brian Klein declared in a packed courtroom in Milwaukee that Hutchins was "not guilty" of six charges related to the alleged creation and distribution of malware. Hutchins will be allowed to travel to Los Angeles, where he will live while he awaits trial. He will also be represented by Marcia Hoffman, formerly of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Under the terms of his release, Hutchins will be tracked by GPS but will be allowed full internet access so he can continue to work as a security researcher; the only restriction is he will no longer be allowed to access the WannaCry "sinkhole" he used to stop the outbreak of ransomware.
get arrested, well thats a way to incentivise Canadian conferences...
This looks like one of those cases when someone was not fully willing to 'cooperate' with certain people and then the FBI is 'tipped off' with some very bogus evidence. I'm speculating, of course, but anyway that's how it looks to me.
"Hutchins will be tracked by GPS but will be allowed full internet access so he can continue to work as a security researcher"
Sounds like they don't have much of a case, otherwise they would be screeching about how he was a flight risk and a danger to society. I'm guessing their case is something like "he developed part of the tool that was eventually used in a bank heist". Which could be like charging the manufacturer of a large drill with conspiracy because one of their drills had been used in a physical bank robbery even if they had never interacted with the actual robbers on any level.
They are alleging that "he was the author of the code that became the Kronos malware"... even if this allegation were true, that should be entirely irrelevant if he neither authored the Kronos malware nor assisted in its distribution.... heck, by that reasoning, practically every computer programming language creator ever should be held accountable for "writing software that would eventually become malware" as well... because essentially, that's what would be amounted to by what they were saying.
You can't justly hold an inventor of a technology accountable for how nefarious people might use it unless you can reasonably demonstrate that there was some kind of cooperation between the inventor and the people that committed the wrongdoing.
Why not hold the parents responsible for breeding in the first place if their child grows up and becomes a murderer?
Gawd, there are so many things wrong with this entire thing, I can barely believe that this trial is actually happening. It is just so fucked up that I don't have the words...
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
"Hutchins will be tracked by GPS but will be allowed full internet access so he can continue to work as a security researcher; the only restriction is he will no longer be allowed to access the WannaCry "sinkhole" he used to stop the outbreak of ransomware."
That tells you everything you need to know.
1. WannaCry used the code from the leaked NSA software.
2. WannaCry included code that looked to check if a specified domain had been registered. If it received a response from the domain, it shut down. If not, it continued to work.
3. The "sinkhole" domain bricked the NSA software and interfered with ongoing ops.
4. Tracking the traffic to the "sinkhole" domain might allow you to determine which traffic was from the NSA software and which one was from the WannaCry variant thus exposing ongoing NSA ops.
'It's not paranoia when they are really out to get you'