WannaCry's Accidental Hero Arrested For Malware Past

Earlier this year, the WannaCry virus infected computer systems around the world. Most notably, the ransomware was responsible for crippling hospital systems in the UK, but it also spread to countries like Russia, German, Turkey, and Spain before it was brought down. This week, one of the researchers responsible for stopping WannaCry was arrested in Nevada.Motherboard writes that Marcus Hutchins, a researcher at Kryptos Logic who's known by his handle of MalwareTech, has been detained by US authorities since Wendesday. Hutchins, who is from the UK, was in the US to attend the Def Con and Black Hat conventions, which are popular hacker conferences that occur in Las Vegas annually.

Even though Hutchins could be considered a hero of sorts for his role in stopping the spread of WannaCry, the indictment released for Hutchins alleges that he played a role in creating, advertising, and selling the Kronos banking trojan. The US Marshals indicated to Motherboard that the FBI was the organization that arrested Hutchins in Nevada.

Kronos was a trojan that was designed to steal login credentials and financial information from online banking websites. Kronos was advertised and sold through internet forums between July 2014 and July 2015, the indictment claims. The indictment lists a timeline that follows when advertising first began all the way up to the point where another unidentified defendant began offering crypting services for Kronos.

A unnamed friend of Hutchins' tells Motherboard that it's unknown where he's being held at the moment. Though he was at Henderson Detention Center earlier today, Hutchins' has apparently been moved to a different facility, leaving friends and family with no reliable way of getting in touch with him. More details about this arrest will likely surface over the next few days, so stay tuned for more.