Search Results for: Internet

The ‘Accidental Hero’ Who Saved the Internet from WannaCry

Marcus Hutchins (R) the British cyber security expert accused of creating and selling malware that steals banking passwords arrives with his lawyers Marcia Homann (L) and Brian Klein (R) at US Federal Courthouse on August 14, 2017 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. / AFP PHOTO / Joshua Lott via Getty Images)

Marcus Hutchins was only 22 years old when he discovered the Achilles heel of WannaCry, a piece of ransomware that caused $8 billion in damage in 2017 by taking down Windows computers around the world — including in banks and hospitals — and encrypting their contents for a $300 ransom. As Andy Greenberg reports in this epic piece for Wired, Hutchins learned to reverse engineer botnets in part by creating and selling his own malware as a youth in England. Hutchins’ darkhat hacking was not without its innocent victims, and the FBI eventually caught up to him. But did he deserve leniency in sentencing, considering the good work he’d done stopping WannaCry in its tracks, saving lives in the process? You be the judge.

Cybersecurity researchers named the worm WannaCry, after the .wncry extension it added to file names after encrypting them. As it paralyzed machines and demanded its bitcoin ransom, WannaCry was jumping from one machine to the next using a powerful piece of code called EternalBlue, which had been stolen from the National Security Agency by a group of hackers known as the Shadow Brokers and leaked onto the open internet a month earlier. It instantly allowed a hacker to penetrate and run hostile code on any unpatched Windows computer—a set of potential targets that likely numbered in the millions. And now that the NSA’s highly sophisticated spy tool had been weaponized, it seemed bound to create a global ransomware pandemic within hours.

Hutchins hadn’t found the malware’s command-and-control address. He’d found its kill switch.

Hutchins says he still hasn’t been able to shake the lingering feelings of guilt and impending punishment that have hung over his life for years. It still pains him to think of his debt to all the unwitting people who helped him, who donated to his legal fund and defended him, when all he wanted to do was confess.

I point out that perhaps this, now, is that confession. That he’s cataloged his deeds and misdeeds over more than 12 hours of interviews; when the results are published—and people reach the end of this article—that account will finally be out in the open. Hutchins’ fans and critics alike will see his life laid bare and, like Stadtmueller in his courtroom, they will come to a verdict. Maybe they too will judge him worthy of redemption. And maybe it will give him some closure.

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The Confessions of Marcus Hutchins, the Hacker Who Saved the Internet

Longreads Pick

“At 22, he single-handedly put a stop to the worst cyberattack the world had ever seen. Then he was arrested by the FBI. This is his untold story.”

Source: Wired
Published: May 12, 2020
Length: 55 minutes (13,941 words)

This Is the Internet We Were Promised

Longreads Pick
Source: The Walrus
Published: Apr 29, 2020
Length: 7 minutes (1,754 words)

Wikipedia Is the Last Best Place on the Internet

Longreads Pick

What happens when you give thousands of pedants a place online to let loose the full force of their passions? Something flawed, but beautiful.

Source: Wired
Published: Feb 17, 2020
Length: 17 minutes (4,445 words)

Don’t Blame the Internet for New Slang

Longreads Pick
Source: The Walrus
Published: Sep 10, 2019
Length: 16 minutes (4,039 words)

The Billion-Dollar High-Speed Internet Scam

Longreads Pick

Why secure actual signatures from partners on multi-million dollar contracts to install fiber-optic cable at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean when you can just forge them?

Published: Oct 8, 2019
Length: 16 minutes (4,209 words)

The Internet Is Overrun With Images of Child Sexual Abuse. What Went Wrong?

Longreads Pick

“Last year, tech companies reported over 45 million online photos and videos of children being sexually abused — more than double what they found the previous year… Online predators create and share the illegal material, which is increasingly cloaked by technology. Tech companies, the government, and the authorities are no match.”

Content Note: “Articles in this series examine the explosion in online photos and videos of children being sexually abused. They include graphic descriptions of some instances of the abuse.”

Published: Sep 28, 2019
Length: 21 minutes (5,381 words)

The Gilded Age of (Unpaid) Internet Writing

Apple Computer / AP, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Rebecca Schuman | Longreads | September 2018 | 12 minutes (2,976 words)

The ’90s Are Old is a Longreads series by Rebecca Schuman, wherein she unpacks the cultural legacy of a decade that refuses to age gracefully.

* * *

In 1998, my first real job — at which I was terrible — was as an editorial assistant for a New York book publisher. My breathtakingly privileged days consisted of emailing mean jokes about the assistants I didn’t like to the assistants I did, and slacking off at my desk during my boss’s long lunches. That’s when I discovered these things called “webzines.” My 1993 black-and-white PowerBook had been powerful enough for abysmal college essays on Heinrich von Kleist, but not for something called a browser, so it was not until my entrée to the professional world and its professional-issue Windows 98 that I began “surfing the ‘Net” in earnest.

In the nascent years of online ubiquity — when CHHHHHHHHHH BEEboo BEEboo BEEboo became a household noise, and not just something for extreme nerds — the web was both very big and very small. In 1996 there were only 100,000 websites in the Whole Wide World. (Today there are almost two billion.) Plus, aside from a few early leaders in e-commerce, ’90s sites were usually personal homepages, accessible only to the visitor patient and accurate enough to type the precise address, down to the tilde. Alas, what made the webzines of the late ’90s the best was also what would end up making the internet the worst: anyone could publish anything about anything, and very few people expected to be paid.

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Facebook Isn’t the Same as “The Internet” Except When It Is

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, second from left, poses for a selfie with the crowd following wreath-laying rites at the Heroes Cemetery to mark National Heroes Day Monday, Aug. 27, 2018. (AP Photo/Bullit Marquez)

Davey Alba‘s BuzzFeed investigation into the ways Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s government uses Facebook to spread propaganda and destroy political opponents is a frightening look at what happens when a tool created by a bunch of developers in California becomes the go-to news source for a country 7,000 miles away.

Just how ubiquitous is Facebook in the Philippines?

In 2012, 29 million Filipinos used Facebook. Today, 69 million people — two-thirds of the population — are on Facebook. The remaining one-third does not have access to the internet. In other words, virtually every Filipino citizen with an internet connection has a Facebook account. For many in one of the most persistently poor nations in the world, Facebook is the only way to access the internet.

Which is pretty much how Facebook wants it. Maria Ressa, the CEO of the news website Rappler, told BuzzFeed News that during an April 2017 meeting with Facebook, she mentioned to Mark Zuckerberg that 97% of Filipinos who had access to the internet also had Facebook accounts (which was true at the time). Zuckerberg frowned, Ressa recalled. Then he asked: “What about the other 3%?”

Facebook’s Internet.org effort has floundered embarrassingly in more than half a dozen nations and territories. But in the Philippines, the social media capital of the world according to global media agency We Are Social, Facebook rushed into a culture that unquestioningly assimilated it.

“We were seduced, we were lured, we were hooked, and then, when we became captive audiences, we were manipulated to see what other people — people with vested interests and evil motives of power and domination — wanted us to see,” de Lima wrote to BuzzFeed News. “It was a slow takeover of our attention. We didn’t notice it until it was already too late.”

Neither did Facebook.

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Jami Attenberg’s #1000WordsofSummer Turned a Corner of the Internet into a Supportive Literary Community

Longreads Pick

An essay on #1000WordsofSummer, the two-week-long public writing-accountability project novelist Jami Attenberg offered to writers for free, via Twitter, Instagram and TinyLetter, from June 15th through June 29th of 2018.

Published: Aug 18, 2018
Length: 6 minutes (1,694 words)