Marcus Hutchins

Marcus Hutchins (born 1994), also known online as MalwareTech, is a British computer security researcher known for stopping the WannaCry ransomware attack.

He is employed by cybersecurity firm Kryptos Logic.

Hutchins is from Ilfracombe in Devon.

Hutchins is the elder son of Janet Hutchins, a Scottish nurse, and Desmond Hutchins, a Jamaican social worker.

Around 2003, when Hutchins was nine years old, the parents moved the family from urban Bracknell, near London, to rural Devon.

Hutchins had shown early aptitude with computers and learned simple hacking skills early on such as bypassing security on school computers to install video game software.

In addition, he spent time learning to be a surf lifeguard.

He became involved with an online forum that promoted malware development, more as a means to show off their skills to each other rather than for nefarious purposes.

When he was about 14 years old, he created his own contribution, a password stealer based on Internet Explorer's AutoFill feature, which was met with approval by the forum.

He spent much of his time with this community to the extent his school work began to fail.

When the school's systems were compromised, the school authorities claimed Hutchins was the culprit.

Though he denied any involvement, school authorities permanently suspended him from using the computers at school, which further pushed Hutchins to skip school more often and spend more time in the malware forums.

At around this time, the original malware forums had been closed, and Hutchins transferred to another hacker community, HackForums.

In this new forum, members were expected to show more skill by demonstrating possession of a botnet.

Hutchins, 15 years old at the time, successfully created an 8,000-computer botnet for HackForums by tricking BitTorrent users into running his fake files to take control of their machines.

Hutchins agreed, and by mid-2012, had completed writing UPAS Kit, named after the poisonous upas tree.

During this period, Hutchins had once complained in his conversations with Vinny about the lack of good weed in the country.

The new code was completed by June 2014, and as Vinny started selling it to the dark web he renamed UPAS Kit 2.0 to Kronos, based on the mythological Greek Titan.

Hutchins had entered community college and was struggling between completing his last year of work and the fixes to Kronos demanded by Vinny, further complicated with a drug addiction he gained while working on Kronos.

During this time, he met a person he knew as "Randy" online through hacking forums.

Randy, who was based in Los Angeles, had sought a banking rootkit like Kronos, which Hutchins did not mention, but led to longer talks to learn that Randy had more philanthropic goals.

To help Randy, Hutchins offered to help him with trading bitcoin.

However, a power failure one night caused Hutchins to lose more than US$5,000 of Randy's bitcoin, and in exchange, Hutchins revealed his connection to Kronos and offered a free copy to Randy.

After they had completed that deal, Hutchins realized the mistake he had made in revealing this to a stranger, and started to fear he would be approached by law enforcement.

Hutchins graduated from community college in 2015 and dropped his drug addiction cold turkey.

He put off requests from Vinny for updates to Kronos claiming he was busy with schoolwork, until soon the requests stopped as well as any further payments from Vinny.

After several months of dread, he decided to start an anonymously written blog on deep analysis of hacks that he called MalwareTech, based on what he had learned evaluating others' rootkits and his own work on UPAS Kit and Kronos, though he spoke nothing of his connection to these rootkits.

As new rootkits appeared, Hutchins began reverse engineering those and writing the details on MalwareTech, such as the Kelihos and Necurs botnet, and wrote his own botnet tracking service that could join the botnet and monitor what operations the controllers of the botnets were doing.

His writings drew the interest of Kryptos Logic's CEO Salim Neino, who offered the writer a job.

Vinny asked for his address, which Hutchins gave, and later on his 17th birthday, he received a package full of various recreational drugs.

Sales of UPAS Kit earned Hutchins thousands of dollars through bitcoin, allowing him to drop out of school and live a comfortable life, though he kept the nature of his work secret from his family.

Vinny shortly came back to Hutchins to ask him to write UPAS Kit 2.0, specifically adding keylogging and web inject for browser form pages.

At this point, Hutchins recognized these features were likely for targeting financial transactions on bank websites, and thus he would be enabling cybercrime if he wrote the update.

Hutchins told Vinny that he refused to write such code, but Vinny held him over the fact he knew his date of birth and address from his prior gift of recreational drugs and was willing to give that to the FBI if Hutchins did not cooperate.

Hutchins reached an agreement to add in the keylogging to UPAS Kit 2.0 but left out anything to do with web inject, which took another nine months to complete.

After this, Vinny told him that he'd had hired another programmer to update UPAS Kit with the web injects, and now wanted Hutchins and this programmer to work together to combine the code to a single package.

Though he was ethically torn on the decision, Hutchins opted to continue working with Vinny to at least make sure he got paid for the work that he did already do, though procrastinated as much as he could.

From this exploit, Hutchins saw financial opportunities for his hacking skills, though at the time he did not feel these were tied to any type of cybercrime, as he stated in a 2020 interview.

These activities included setting up "ghosted" web hosting for others on the HackForums for "all illegal sites" except child porn, and created custom malware, often based on evaluating how others' rootkits operated.

According to Hutchins in later interviews and in his plea agreement, when he was around 16, having gained a reputation in hacking circles for his custom malware, he was approached by an online entity he knew only as "Vinny", who asked him to write a well-maintained, multifaceted rootkit that could be sold on multiple hacker marketplaces, with Hutchins to be paid half of the profits of each sale.