MalwareTech – The British security researcher (Marcus Hutchins) who stopped the WannaCry ransomware attack—has been arrested in the United States on accusations of creating the Kronos banking trojan together with another person.
MalwareTech’s arrest shocked the security community. It is ambiguity why the Internet security researcher has been arrested by the FBI.
The researcher got fame over two months ago when the WannaCry ransomware started hitting victims across the world, and he was able to stop its global spread by registering a domain name (“hxxp://www[.]iuqerfsodp9ifjaposdfjhgosurijfaewrwergwea[.]com”) hidden in the malware.
WannaCry was really bad, It was a hard attack for many organizations all over the world, a new ransomware attack called ‘WannaCry’ is spreading by exploiting the SMB vulnerability and is encrypting files and changing the extensions to .wnry, .wcry, .wncry and .wncrypt. that started its attack against hospitals across the UK before spreading across the globe.
A spokesperson from the U.S. Department of Justice said that the researcher has been detained by the FBI for his role in creating and spreading the Kronos banking Trojan.
“Kronos is a banking trojan first seen in 2014 and reemerged in November 2016, distributed through email campaigns. In a campaign on November 8, the trojan was delivered with links leading to the RIG-V exploit kit and a redirect to a ZIP-compressed .pif for Smoke Loader, used to download additional malware, and the ZeuS trojan. “