Researcher facing six charges after being detained this week
Hutchins attended Def Con in Las Vegas and was on his way home after the conference, but the FBI arrested him just as he prepared to board a plane on August 2 at the McCarran airport. Also known as @MalwareTechBlog on Twitter and working for security research firm Kryptos Logic, the 23-year-old security researcher is more often called a white hat hacker whose role is to fight malware, not to create it.
The United States Department of Justice, however, claims Hutchins was involved in the creation of Kronos, a banking Trojan that was sold on the AlphaBay dark web market which was shut down by law enforcement earlier this year.
“Marcus Hutchins… a citizen and resident of the United Kingdom, was arrested in the United States on 2 August, 2017, in Las Vegas, Nevada, after a grand jury in the Eastern District of Wisconsin returned a six-count indictment against Hutchins for his role in creating and distributing the Kronos banking Trojan, ” the DoJ said.
“The charges against Hutchins, and for which he was arrested, relate to alleged conduct that occurred between in or around July 2014 and July 2015.”
Hutchins is now charged with one count of conspiracy to commit computer fraud and abuse, three counts of distributing and advertising an electronic communication interception device, one count of endeavoring to intercept electronic communications, and one count of attempting to access a computer without authorisation.
Security researchers Kevin Beaumont and Andrew Mabbitt said in tweets posted a few hours ago that the FBI had made a mistake, as Hutchins only fights against malware.
“This is Kronos builder, it looks like the US justice system has made a huge mistake, ” Beaumont tweeted. “I refuse to believe the charges against @MalwareTechBlog, not the MT [MalwareTech] I know at all. He spent his career stopping malware, not writing it, ” Mabbitt added.
Even though Hutchins was arrested in Las Vegas, there’s little information as to where he is being held, with friends on Twitter asking for information from the US law enforcement. It’s believed he was transferred from the Henderson Detection Center in Nevada to a different place, but the US DoJ has until now refused to make any comments on this.
Kronos is a banking Trojan that was sold for nearly $7,000 and which was first spotted in 2014, being capable of stealing banking information and draining bank accounts.
Marcus Hutchins is often referred as the WannaCry hero, as he managed to stop the famous ransomware infection earlier this year by registering a domain the infection used in the attack.
