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Researcher Who Stopped WannaCry Ransomware Detained in US After Def Con
11–20 of 268 posts
Re: Researcher Who Stopped WannaCry Ransomware Detained in US After Def Con
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
So where is he? It surely can't be secret, regardless of who arrested him?
They would need to ask the FBI, not the Marshals.
And if the FBI won't say either?
Re: Researcher Who Stopped WannaCry Ransomware Detained in US After Def Con
#13> "I've spoken to the US Marshals again and they say they have no record of Marcus being in the system. At this point we've been trying to get in contact with Marcus for 18 hours and nobody knows where he's been taken," the person added. "We still don't know why Marcus has been arrested and now we have no idea where in the US he's been taken to and we're extremely concerned for his welfare." What the hell? How does s…
> What the hell? How does something like this even happen? Surely they can't just take somebody away and keep it a secret?
You absolutely can. [1]
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/feb/24/chicago-poli...
Re: Researcher Who Stopped WannaCry Ransomware Detained in US After Def Con
#14This sends a clear message to the global whitehat security community: travel to the US at your own peril.
There are zero details on this story...calm down..
Re: Researcher Who Stopped WannaCry Ransomware Detained in US After Def Con
#15--
At this point we can certainly hope he hasn't just been disappeared forever.
Re: Researcher Who Stopped WannaCry Ransomware Detained in US After Def Con
#16Re: Researcher Who Stopped WannaCry Ransomware Detained in US After Def Con
#17They're surprisingly clever, to arrest after DefCon. Typical stupid USA LEOs would arrest ASAP, so the unjust detention could be a cause célèbre hyped up by half the talks.
Re: Researcher Who Stopped WannaCry Ransomware Detained in US After Def Con
#18I'm curious what charges are being brought against him. For all we know, this detention is completely unrelated to WannaCry. We shall see.
I may be totally off base here but IIRC, before he ran MalwareTech and was a whitehat, he participated (and was an op) in fairly "shady" IRC channels, with his oldest nick I can recall being `Ntoskrnl`, dedicated to malware and malware development which even had a person (Edit3: As pointed out in this thread, that person was `BetaMonkey/TouchMe`) who was selling a variant of a botnet drone client builder. Edit2: From one of the comments below in this thread, the network on which he was present (and was an IRC operator of) was `irc.voidptr.cz` or a variation of that, I could not recall the name of the network at first but when someone mentioned it, I instantly recognized it.
If he's who I think he is, I doubt his early background is that clean, despite him being a whitehat now. It is very much possible he is being held because of something related to that and not because of anything related to WannaCry. This was all before he even started running the MalwareTech blog, it's very much possible the FBI decided to look into his background or were already familiar with it prior to him arriving in or leaving the US.
That being said, it's possible that I'm mistaking him for someone else in which case I do apologize. I edited the post a bit, to clarify, the first paragraph to the best of my knowledge is certainly true, second one is based on my own speculation so take it with a grain of salt.
Re: Researcher Who Stopped WannaCry Ransomware Detained in US After Def Con
#19Maybe he violated WannaCry's terms of service. The DoJ are pretty down on that kind of thing.
Re: Researcher Who Stopped WannaCry Ransomware Detained in US After Def Con
#20This sends a clear message to the global whitehat security community: travel to the US at your own peril.
There are zero details on this story...calm down..
There are absolutely details:
> Motherboard verified that a detainee called Marcus Hutchins, 23, was being held at the Henderson Detention Center in Nevada early on Thursday.
So at least we know he was detained.
This one relies on a friend, so presumably it's "less verified" as far as these things go:
> A few hours after, Hutchins was moved to another facility, according to a close personal friend.
I don't know if Motherboard has tried to contact Hutchins, though.