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.
That’s when her son came upstairs and told her, a little uncertainly, that he seemed to have stopped the worst malware attack the world had ever seen.
“Well done, sweetheart,” Janet Hutchins said. Then she went back to chopping onions.
This is the most parent thing I’ve read in a long long time
Reads like a scene out of a sitcom.
Great story
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.
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Wow, this was a really interesting one! Makes me think how we can prevent teenagers from doing crime from their bedrooms in the digital age. If some policeman would have knocked on their door after his first shady things and a judge would have given him some community service, he probably would never have made it all the way to writing Kronos.
I don’t think we’ll ever stop teenagers from being dumb. Just try and make sure they don’t blow up their entire lives in the process
Tremendous journalism.
Thanks for sharing OP.
