Pierluigi Paganini July 27, 2019

Marcus Hutchins has been sentenced to “time served” and one year of supervised release his role in developing and selling the Kronos banking malware.

The popular researcher Marcus Hutchins, also known as MalwareTech, has been sentenced to “time served” and one year of supervised release his role in developing and selling the Kronos banking malware.

In April, Hutchins has pleaded guilty to developing and sharing the Kronos banking malware between July 2014 and July 2015.

Marcus Hutchins made the headlines after discovering the “kill switch” that halted the outbreak of the WannaCry ransomware. In August 2017, he was arrested in Las Vegas after attending the Def Con hacking conference and was detained by the FBI in the state of Nevada.

In August 2017, Marcus Hutchins pleaded not guilty to charges of creating and selling malware at a hearing in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. 
The court decided to relax the expert bail terms, allowing him to access the Internet and continues his ordinary working activities. The only restriction on Hutchins is that the expert cannot visit the Wannacry server domain.

The decision is unusual because computer crime suspects are not allowed to stay online.

The court allowed him to live in Los Angeles, where the company that hired him is located, but he was obliged to surrender his passport and he must wear a tracking device until his trial in October.

Now the sentence states that there is no prison for the expert, Presiding Judge J. P. Stadtmueller described Hutchins as a “talented” but “youthful offender.”

“It’s going to take the people like [Hutchins] with your skills to come up with solutions because that’s the only way we’re going to eliminate this entire subject of the woefully inadequate security protocols,” explained Stadmueller.

The sentence takes into account the age of the expert and decided to give him and his talent a second opportunity

Stadtmueller said his sentence is likely, however, to bar him from re-entering the United States.

Below the Hutchins declaration after the sentence:

The judge explained that Hutchins has already served his jail time when he was arrested in Los Angeles and was forced to spend one year in the US under supervised release.

Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – Marcus Hutchins, cybercrime)

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