The war against security researchers continues to dismay, and it always feels like the boot of the man showing up to put the intellectuals in their place.
This isn't exactly some Orwellian crackdown on anyone who dare play with malware or malicious infrastructure. The allegation is far beyond what any white or even gray hat researcher would ever do. Of course, the allegations may be completely false, but let's at least make sure we're all talking about the same thing.
In all cases (without exception) where that's the case, the result is legal, yet not something that can properly be called justice. The current circumstances sure look like this, but it is - of course - still a little to early to tell.
So did marcus plan and execute a serious crime, or did a series of events occur that happened to include hacking tools and sales to individuals that can be presented as criminal, such that a little creative cherry-picking can weave a nefarious tale?
The longer this case goes on the stranger it gets.
My current working theory is that the FBI was investigating the Kronos malware, caught one of the developers and/or sellers and they knew he was working with someone, but not who, and this redacted person didn't like MalwareTech for any myriad of reasons so he claimed, as an informant that the other developer was MalwareTech.
Like I said, just a theory. I could be wrong and we haven't seen the FBI's evidence.
Notice the "became the Kronos malware". It's entirely possible Kronos used MalwareTech's open source PoC's of rootkits and other things, he knew, and was asked about it and but without the guidance of a lawyer said: "Sure. I wrote TinyXPB." or similar.
Concerning for sure.
> My current working theory is that the FBI was investigating the Kronos malware, caught one of the developers and/or sellers and they knew he was working with someone, but not who, and this redacted person didn't like MalwareTech for any myriad of reasons so he claimed, as an informant that the other developer was MalwareTech.