Hacker News Reader

Comment by mnarayan01 | Hacker News Reader

As someone who's not sure where I stand on this, I feel like Hutchins supporters are doing themselves a disservice by overly-conflating this with WannaCry. I think there's potentially a good argument to be made along the lines of "Hutchins good work w.r.t. WannaCry is the only reason that anyone (including law enforcement) is aware of semi-historical Kronos, so going after him for Kronos is equivalent to going after him for WannaCry." Additionally, there may well be other arguments in his favor that I'm not even thinking of.

But those arguments need to be made (and the one I outlined would need decent factual details). That said...maybe glossing over (or even totally ignoring) Kronos is the best way for Hutchins supporters to go...but if it is, that seems an unfortunate reflection on society.

View on HN

I don't think that's what these researchers are saying. I think they are saying more along the lines of: "Hutchins has shown that he is a security researcher through his work on wannacry. As a security researcher, he probably has researched other problems as well, possibly including Kronos. The fact that he was arrested with little to no evidence could be showing that the DOJ is willing to arrest people who have copies of virus source code on their computers, even if they only accessed it for research purposes. In fact he may have updated Kronos code or written some part of Kronos as part of research to validate a hypothesis or test a theory. Such actions are ordinary actions for researchers, so this puts at risk most computer security research across the world."

> The fact that he was arrested with little to no evidence

How do you know what evidence does or doesn't exist? The case hasn't even been brought to trial yet.

>> The fact that he was arrested with little to no evidence...

Do you really think they are loosely tying Marcus to Kronos with little to no evidence? Why go through all the trouble? Just because they haven't shared evidence in a sealed case doesn't mean they have no evidence. It's safe to assume there is evidence and it'll be interesting to see what it is.

I think this is also an argument with potential (at least when presented as here, i.e. without excessive reference to WannaCry), but I think you need to either have a decent amount of affirmative evidence against him having sold Kronos or to wait at least several days before using the DOJ's absence of presented evidence as evidence of absence.

W.r.t. the latter, I'm not saying that the DOJ should have had him arrested if it lacks serious evidence of his guilt. I'm saying that his arrest has happened; it's too late to stop it. The question is whether it should have happened, and, since we're highly unlikely to be able to change anything within a few days, it seems like it makes sense to wait a few days before asserting that the DOJ lacked evidence to support the arrest if only to avoid poising the well. If it turns out that they didn't have any evidence, then the arrest was a problem which needs to have consequences. But I think being over-eager at this point greatly lowers the probability of there being any such consequences.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com