Marcus Hutchins doesn’t personally consider himself a hacker – but he accepts the epithet because it’s a widely used term for what he once did.
Born in Ascot, England, he was working as a cyber threat analyst for an LA-based cybersecurity company in 2017 (aged 22), when he became the world’s hero for finding a kill switch for the particularly virulent and destructive cryptoworm (ransomware spread by a worm) known as WannaCry. The ransomware decryption didn’t work, so there was no way to decrypt files once encrypted (it was effectively a wiper). But the worm worked very well, and more than 200,000 computers were affected in around 150 countries in just a few days.
Three months after saving the world, he was arrested by the FBI.
This is the typically convoluted world navigated by a ‘hacker’ – a world we try to unravel in this series of Hacker Conversations.
The young Marcus Hutchins
