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The Confessions of the Hacker Who Saved the Internet - At 22, he single-handedly put a stop to the worst cyberattack the world had ever seen. Then he was arrested by the FBI. (archive.ph)
submitted 4 months ago by awesome_lowlander@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/longreads@sh.itjust.works
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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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[-] awesome_lowlander@lemmy.dbzer0.com 14 points 4 months ago

Turns out when you're an actual teenage hacker on the darkweb, mum's fears about 'bad guys' do have some substance to them after all.

this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2024
112 points (99.1% liked)

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