https://www.wired.com/story/confessions-marcus-hutchins-hacker-who-saved-the-internet/
By Andy Greenberg
Wired.com
May 12, 2020
AT AROUND 7 am on a quiet Wednesday in August 2017, Marcus Hutchins walked out
the front door of the Airbnb mansion in Las Vegas where he had been partying
for the past week and a half. A gangly, 6'4", 23-year-old hacker with an
explosion of blond-brown curls, Hutchins had emerged to retrieve his order of a
Big Mac and fries from an Uber Eats deliveryman. But as he stood barefoot on
the mansion's driveway wearing only a T-shirt and jeans, Hutchins noticed a
black SUV parked on the street—one that looked very much like an FBI stakeout.
He stared at the vehicle blankly, his mind still hazed from sleep deprivation
and stoned from the legalized Nevada weed he'd been smoking all night. For a
fleeting moment, he wondered: Is this finally it?
But as soon as the thought surfaced, he dismissed it. The FBI would never be so
obvious, he told himself. His feet had begun to scald on the griddle of the
driveway. So he grabbed the McDonald's bag and headed back inside, through the
mansion's courtyard, and into the pool house he'd been using as a bedroom. With
the specter of the SUV fully exorcised from his mind, he rolled another spliff
with the last of his weed, smoked it as he ate his burger, and then packed his
bags for the airport, where he was scheduled for a first-class flight home to
the UK.
Hutchins was coming off of an epic, exhausting week at Defcon, one of the
world's largest hacker conferences, where he had been celebrated as a hero.
Less than three months earlier, Hutchins had saved the internet from what was,
at the time, the worst cyberattack in history: a piece of malware called
WannaCry. Just as that self-propagating software had begun exploding across the
planet, destroying data on hundreds of thousands of computers, it was Hutchins
who had found and triggered the secret kill switch contained in its code,
neutering WannaCry's global threat immediately.
[...]
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