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US Piles New Charges on Marcus Hutchins (aka MalwareTech) (bleepingcomputer.com)
British cyber-security researcher Marcus Hutchins, who has been credited with stopping the spread of WannaCry, is now facing four more charges related to separate malware he is alleged to have created. BleepingComputer reports: According to court documents, the new charges are for allegedly creating another piece of malware and for lying to the FBI. Hutchins had previously been accused of creating and selling the Kronos banking trojan last year. But in a superseding indictment filed this week, U.S. prosecutors claim Hutchins also coded and sold another piece of malware called the UPAS Kit. According to US prosecutors, UPAS Kit "used a form grabber and web injects to intercept and collect personal information from a protected computer," and "allowed for the unauthorized exfiltration of information from protected computers." The U.S. government claims Hutchins sold this second malware strain in July 2012 to a person going by the online pseudonym of Aurora123, who later infected US users. Hutchins expressed disappointment on the development, tweeting, "Spend months and $100k+ fighting this case, then they go and reset the clock by adding even more bullshit charges like 'lying to the FBI.' We require more minerals." In a subsequent tweet, he requested people to help him with the cost of legal proceedings.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-p...
You're Canadian I take it (the reason I'm guessing that is because most Canadians think it was a war of conquest on the part of the US, and they also think it was Canadians who burned the White House, but the joke's on them: Canada had no actual Army, it was all British Army, and Canada only had defensive militia, which quickly fell once the US went on the offensive.)
So while they might teach that in Canadian schools, that's not what happened. During the Napoleonic wars, England raised a naval blockade to prevent America from trading with France (as well as many others) without provocation on our part, and stepped up their efforts of pressing American merchant sailors into service for England's war effort. England then supplied natives that were raiding American settlements (which also resulted in Tecumseh's death and the fall of his nation, and to further retaliation against other tribes on the part of the Americans) as England also had the goal of annexing much of our territory at the time.
That really isn't a nice thing to do, and our means of fighting back included an invasion and occupation of some of Canada (mostly the populated regions, mind you, which was easy to do given England's lack of defense of upper Canada, which allowed us to hit lower Canada from the north) with the intention of forcing England to negotiate, which England wouldn't do as they refused to recognize the sovereignty of the US. Then we also defeated of the British invasion of the southern states.
In the end it was mostly a stalemate, but the US came out with a better political position, which maked it a favorable outcome for the US:
- It reasserted Independence for the Americans (at the time, England still considered the US to be theirs, and US citizens to be the king's subjects, which Canada remains to this day, mind you)
- The US was able to negotiate an end to England's impressment of Americans.
- The US did not lose any territory.
And by the way, impressment was England's version of slavery, which they also did to Canadians (before US involvement with this war, Canadian men in Nova Scotia would get picked up by press gangs, beaten if they tried to escape, and were never heard from again, meanwhile Canadians were happily serving their English masters) as well as England's own. Sailors that were pressed into service didn't get any pay, were forced to serve much longer than those who enlisted (in reality, there was no set end of service date for them, they just served as long as the captain made them) they had to do all of the worst work, they didn't get shore leave, and England only pretended to pay them.