The Dark Secrets of a Hacking Hero
Uncanny Valley | WIRED
WIRED
4.1 • 575 Ratings
🗓️ 15 May 2020
⏱️ 32 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In May of 2017, Marcus Hutchins saved the internet. A vicious ransomware attack known as WannaCry had infected computer systems across dozens of countries. It was the worst cyberattack in history at the time, and it seemed unstoppable. But Hutchins, a 23-year-old-hacker in Ilfracombe, England, discovered a secret kill switch that stopped the malware from propagating. Hutchins became a celebrity overnight, with the hacker community and the media hailing him as a hero. But all of the newfound attention was not good for him. Three months after defeating the malware, Marcus was arrested by the FBI—not for his involvement in WannaCry, but for a string of past illegal activities that he had kept secret.
This week on Gadget Lab, WIRED senior writer Andy Greenberg joins us to talk about Hutchins' remarkable story. In the second half of the show, Andy gives us an update on the efforts to set up a contact tracing system to monitor the spread of the coronavirus.
Show Notes:
Read Andy’s cover story about the hacker who saved the internet here. His story about contact tracing in India is here. Also check out Andy’s book, Sandworm. Read more about the WannaCry ransomware attack here. Follow all of WIRED’s cybersecurity coverage here.
Recommendations:
Andy recommends the book The Mastermind by Evan Ratliff. Lauren recommends NPR’s Planet Money podcast. Mike recommends The New York Times Magazine story “What Happened to Val Kilmer? He’s Just Starting to Figure It Out.”
Andy Greenberg can be found on Twitter @a_greenberg. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is @snackfight. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). Our executive producer is Alex Kapelman (@alexkapelman). Our theme music is by Solar Keys.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi everyone. Welcome to Gadget Lab. I'm Lauren Good, a senior writer at Wired, and I'm joined |
| 0:12.0 | remotely by my co-host, Wired Senior Editor Michael Callory. Hey, Mike. Hello, hello. Nice to hear from |
| 0:18.6 | you again. Nice to see you over Zoom, although we can't be in person in studio. |
| 0:22.8 | Good to see you, too. |
| 0:24.1 | And we are joined this week by Wired Senior Writer Andy Greenberg, who's also the author of Sandworm, |
| 0:29.5 | a new era of cyber war in the hunt for the Kremlin's most dangerous hackers. |
| 0:34.3 | Andy, thanks for joining us. |
| 0:35.9 | Hi, guys. Nice to see you remotely. Andy, I just learned that |
| 0:39.6 | it's been a really long time since we've had you on the Wired podcast, possibly six years or so, |
| 0:46.6 | possibly. We were trying to figure out when, but I'm happy to say that nothing has changed |
| 0:51.9 | since then. There's no news. The world is not dramatically different |
| 0:55.3 | since the last time you were on the Gatchet Lab podcast. So we'll just call this a wrap. |
| 0:59.9 | Exactly. Yeah, go out, drink some coffee. We've actually brought Andy on this week to talk about |
| 1:04.8 | a really compelling story he wrote that published this week on wire.com. It's the most |
| 1:09.8 | popular story on our website right now, |
| 1:11.6 | and for good reason. It's called The Confessions of Marcus Hutchins, the hacker who saved the |
| 1:16.5 | internet. And it's also Wired's June cover story. So back in 2017, Hutchins put a stop to a malware |
| 1:23.7 | called Wanna Cry, which some of you might remember. At the time, it was the worst |
| 1:28.0 | cyber attack in history, but Marcus found a way to neutralize it. Effectively, he found the |
| 1:33.7 | kill switch. Then, just three months later, the FBI arrested him, accusing him of creating a |
| 1:39.8 | different type of malware years earlier. Andy, you take us through Marcus' remarkable life, |
| 1:47.0 | and he's still relatively young, so he's done a lot in a short period of time. |
... |
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