"It seems to be suggesting that writing software of this type is a felony which is highly problematic for the information software industry as a whole," he said.
The arrest appears linked to the FBI’s shutdown of a notorious online criminal marketplace called AlphaBay, where Hutchins is accused of selling the Kronos malware. The Justice Department announced late last month that it had dismantled the site, which it said had 200,000 users and 40,000 sellers. The site had hundreds of thousands of listings for drugs, guns, fake IDs and hacker tools. The alleged founder, a 26-year-old Canadian living in Thailand named Alexandre Cazes, was found dead in his jail cell shortly after his arrest, in an apparent suicide.
The language in the indictment and timing of the allegations suggest that federal investigators used information they learned in the probe of AlphaBay to build the case against Hutchins, who became a reluctant celebrity after news outlets published his real name -- ‘doxing,’ in hacker parlance -- following his WannaCry intervention.
His arrest coincides with a conclusion of sorts for the WannaCry attacks. On Thursday, three bitcoin wallets linked to the malware were emptied out, with the tokens divided into smaller amounts and sent to other bitcoin addresses. The wallets held a combined 52 BTC, or about $140,000.
The case is U.S. v. Hutchins, 17-cr-00124, U.S. District Court, Eastern District of Wisconsin (Milwaukee).
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.