Doxing the hero who stopped WannaCry was irresponsible and dumb

https://thenextweb.com/insider/2017/05/15/doxing-hero-stopped-wannacry-irresponsible-dumb/

by ascorbic • 9 years ago

442 103 9 years ago

thenextweb.com

custos• 9 years ago

Yeah, let's tell everyone everything about someone who partially foiled an organized crime operation.

What could possibly go wrong?

jlebrech2• 9 years ago

they came to the wrong conclusion that someone who bought a kill switch domain, would have been one of the hackers. when it fact the kill switch was firewall check (look for 502 rather than 404) and the person who bought the domain kill switched it for everyone.

Sucky journalism strikes again.

vultour• 9 years ago

Where did you come to the conclusion that they think he was one of the hackers? Neither the link, nor the Telegraph article said anything like that AFAIK.

jlebrech2• 9 years ago

you know the media, they'll let the reader make the conclusion.

gadders2• 9 years ago

I saw that at the weekend. The guy did a good thing and obviously didn't want his name out there.

It was a pretty shitty thing to do.

mr_spothawk• 9 years ago

maybe it's some sort of "parallel construction" payback motive

krona• 9 years ago

There is a newspaper claiming he's now working with GCHQ. I doubt such information is true, but given what happened to Gareth Williams in similar circumstances, I'd suggest it's egregiously irresponsible for a newspaper to even suggest it given everyone now knows who he is.

proaralyst• 9 years ago

For those curious as I was: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Gareth_Williams

poooogles• 9 years ago

Never knew about the claims around the SVR, at the time it seemed way to convenient to be what the investigation claimed.

And SIS/GCHQ wonder why they have such a hard time recruiting staff.

sillysaurus32• 9 years ago

https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/6990kh/til_i...

It's definitely weird, but there's a reason (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/apr/25/mi6-gareth-wil...) that they considered this as a real possibility:

But his former landlady, Jennifer Elliot, told the inquest that three years before his death, she and her husband had heard Williams call for help at 1.30am from the annex flat he was renting from them in Cheltenham, where he worked at GCHQ.
They let themselves in with the spare key and found the codes expert lying on his back on the bed, in boxer shorts, with his hands tied to the bed posts with material so tight it had cut his wrists.
In a statement read to the inquest, Elliot said she and her husband had both been in shock. Her husband asked Williams: "What the bloody hell are you doing?" Williams told them: "I just wanted to see if could get myself free."
The statement added that he did not appear sexually aroused, and was "very embarrassed, panicky and apologetic."
The couple, who never spoke to anyone about the incident, said they concluded it was "sexual rather than escapology".

rdrey• 9 years ago

If you're still curious, this has been turned into a BBC mini-series called "London Spy". See: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/nov/12/london...

sasas2• 9 years ago

He applied for GHCQ but while waiting for clearance, he was offered a better job offer.

https://www.malwaretech.com/2016/05/infosec-without-degree.h...

DanBC2• 9 years ago

GCHQ / CESG / etc do some arm's length work with a few people without directly employing them.

nthcolumn• 9 years ago

Gareth was a quiet, private person completely unknown prior to his death. Various news media pawed over the gory detail without so much as a thought to public interest or the bereaved.

tenryuu2• 9 years ago

I've had my shit doxxed by the media before, but fortunate enough they were kind enough to redact information on request. It was a very quick turn-around

1337biz• 9 years ago

Story?

tenryuu2• 9 years ago

Just a simple internet website prank that went viral with fake news. Was about three years ago now

SideburnsOfDoom• 9 years ago

I'd be extremely surprised if the Daily Mail did that.

tudorconstantin• 9 years ago

If some journalists were able to find his identity, he can safely assume that the people behind wannacry are also able to do it. Maybe he'll take some measures to protect himslef more now.

I would've liked to see the journalists find the hackers behind this. That would've been an achievement indeed.

tonmoy• 9 years ago

I would have liked to see a story from the journalists on how easy it was for them to find the guy and then they had responsibility alerted the person on those points w/o revealing his name (you know like what security researchers do)

infinity0• 9 years ago

Yeah, but they would have had to waste several dozen man hours having to redo the work that the British media did for them, for free. Cunts.

dagw• 9 years ago

If some journalists were able to find his identity, he can safely assume that the people behind wannacry are also able to do it.

How do you figure? Digging through information and finding out this sort of stuff is literally what journalists do for a living.

thrownblown• 9 years ago

Digging through information and finding out this sort of stuff is literally what hackers do for a living

for lack of a better term

Nadya5• 9 years ago

I occasionally offer to dox people to show them how bad their OpSec truly is or as an example of why I don't use social media like Facebook for privacy concerns. Doxing people is often trivial since nearly anyone contributing to discussions online have large online profiles. It isn't a very difficult task - just a game of connecting the dots and knowing how to construct specific Google search queries (eg: "site:___ + 'some info'").

If a journalist can find it - any internet layman who knows how to Google can find it.

xupybd• 9 years ago

If they had enough money behind them it would not have been hard to hire a private detective or similar professional to find him.

xroche• 9 years ago

If some journalists were able to find his identity, he can safely assume that the people behind wannacry are also able to do it. Maybe he'll take some measures to protect himslef more now.

The people behind wannacry targeted Russian banks. Chances are they already died of unexpected radioactive contamination, accidental stabbing, or unfortunate neuro-toxic poisoning.

Anyway, comparing these journalists as "sphincters of bad journalism" is probably even too positive. Unlike sphincters, that do have a useful purpose, tabloids could be wiped out of this planet without any negative side-effects.

sasas2• 9 years ago

The people behind wannacry targeted Russian banks.

Do you have a reference for this?

duxup• 9 years ago

I'm not sure the people behind this are going to bother researching it themselves.... but if handed to them they might choose to do so.

pmontra• 9 years ago

Maybe the wannacry people had more profitable ways to invest their resources, but the cost of pursuing this guy is much lower now.

tripzilch2• 9 years ago

This. It's the added opportunity that put this researcher in unnecessary danger.

It's like, almost every front door lock can be broken, or circumvented by smashing a window. Leaving your front door unlocked and open however, creates opportunity, that really increases the danger of burglary.

golergka3• 9 years ago

I respect the intent of the article, but I feel that the author completely misjudges the intentions and perspective of the mainstream journalists and their readership. It looks more like a culture clash than malice.

MalwareTech doesn’t give out his name on his Twitter page or blog. There are no headshots. It’s obvious that he just wants to be left alone to get on with what he enjoys – hacking shit, and figuring out how stuff works.

For a modern mainstream internet user, who sees that everybody goes with their real names and photo (except trolls), it's not obvious.

stalking other people’s Twitter and Instagram accounts

How can reading information that people have voluntarily posted online for everyone to see can be called "stalking"?

The weird emphasis about his fondness for pizza, and how he works from a small bedroom in his parents’ place? That shows they don’t actually respect him, or what he’s accomplished.

To me, it shows just that they were interested to paint a picture of a human being instead of just a username. I feel that HN audience is very used to talking to someone whom they know just by a nickname, with no personal details or information - but for the general public, the concept of "anonymous hacker" is not associated with anything good.

Why do I need to know his age, and that he enjoys pizza? Why do I need to know his name, or know what he looks like? Does anyone care that he enjoys surfing? It adds nothing to the story.

Look at any NYT or Guardian longread about a complicated issue that touches a lot of people - instead of analyzing statistics (as I personally would prefer), they always include an individual story or two, with unrelated personal details, to make the reader feel "connected". Only logical to assume that, while to me, and probably, to HN reader, this is just irritating and distracting, that's what "general public" wants to read about.

aphexbr• 9 years ago

"for the general public, the concept of "anonymous hacker" is not associated with anything good"

An association that's largely created by these tabloids in the first place.

"that's what "general public" wants to read about"

Maybe, but if that's what's required, they should be requesting an interview with him and only reveal what he agrees to reveal. If he wishes to, that could lead to a more insightful look at a man and his motivations rather than random paragraphs about pizza and surfing.

If he chose not to reveal anything, a responsible journalist would accept that and understand that the man has reasons for wishing to stay anonymous. Not dig into his information and publish it anyway, leading to both him and his friends being needlessly harassed for preventing crimes. At the very least, this could lead to future would-be Samaritans from deploying fixes or publicly detailing their methods.

At least they manages to increase their clicks with some facts rather than just making things up, I suppose.

golergka3• 9 years ago

I feel that you're trying to argue against some of my points, but we're not in disagreement.

I'm not saying that the current state of affairs is good or defending it; however, I think that the blame is misplaced and the problem lies in culture clash, not in malice (as often happens with the media).

Bartweiss2• 9 years ago

I think some of this is true, but it doesn't really excuse anything.

I mean, you're right about his age and pizza and hobbies. They turn a tech-news story ("Major malware attack stops") into a human-interest one ("Meet the man who saved the internet"), which plays way better for these papers. The general public, or at least their readership, probably does enjoy those details.

And I suspect they didn't exactly consider this 'doxxing'. It's a less invasive piece than a lot of what they run, and the information was available via public sources. The Sun in particular considers felony phone-tapping fair game, so this is almost chivalrous by their standards.

---

But... none of that justifies a damn thing. The general public wants plenty of things that are harmful or illegal, and we don't accept "people wanted it" as a defense of those things. The Sun, as I mentioned, proved that point in spectacular fashion.

Even conceding that the information was available, this isn't something excused by decent journalistic ethics. Publishing nominally-positive personal accounts about people without any attempt to contact them or let them request redactions is pretty odd. Showing up at their friend's houses without notice or interview requests to the main player is bizarre and unwelcome. Offering real name and location info on someone who just interfered with a major criminal action is downright irresponsible - he made the info available in the past, but might have felt pretty differently after interfering with this attack. Using his Twitter photos (unembedded) is comparatively harmless, but it's also illegal!

So yeah, I see why there was a human-interest piece run here. But that doesn't actually justify how the thing was handled.

golergka3• 9 years ago

I didn't mention anything about "excuse" or "justify" in my comment; trying to project these things onto the moral axis is pointless and kind of boring, actually. I think it's far more interesting in figuring out _why_ people do certain things and how to change it than to assign "good" and "evil" labels to their acts.

felipelemos• 9 years ago

[...] but for the general public, the concept of "anonymous hacker" is not associated with anything good.

It's absolute no excuse for the doxer.

OwlsParliament• 9 years ago

The Telegraph, The Sun and the Daily Mail are utter shitstains.

Bakary• 9 years ago

We have the media we deserve, for the most part.

Bartweiss2• 9 years ago

True I suppose, but the problem is that this guy got the media someone else deserved. The victims and the audience aren't the same groups.

FluffyTheWalrus• 9 years ago

Got to love the news! They just love throwing anyone under the bus..

pferde• 9 years ago

Well, it's been an adage for many years - names sell newspapers... I mean, clicks and ad views.

beedogs• 9 years ago

This was mostly Murdoch's rags, which, unfortunately, many folks can't distinguish from actual newspapers.

gadders2• 9 years ago

It was the Sun, the Telegraph and the Daily Mail. Only on of those belongs to Murdoch.

jerf• 9 years ago

If only "Murdoch's rags" were doing this sort of thing, the media landscape would be a lot better than it is now.

Once you personal preferences because you happen to be ideologically aligned with a particular news source, I have a hard time seeing how pretty much any of the major mainstream media outlets is better or worse than any of the others. (Yes, this includes the New York Times, too.)

Ironically, I was just complaining on HN a couple of days ago about the near-death of investigative journalism and how when historians go to assign a date for that event it'll probably be in the past. So it's even more egregious in some ways than I think it initially sounds that these journalists dox'ed this guy... they don't seem to have the resources to do much truly investigative journalism nowadays, and this is what they spend those scant resources on! Why not just come out and tell us all that they're too afraid nowadays to do any investigative journalism on anyone with even a hint of power?

Dolores123• 9 years ago

They failed to find creators of wanacry, so they found the guy that didn't hide and made him look like he did something bad.

cpncrunch4• 9 years ago

No, they presented him as a hero, because that's what he is, and that's what people want to hear about.

Dolores123• 9 years ago

Did you happen to read his tweets?

neogodless4• 9 years ago

They may not use the term "doxxed" lightly, but they also don't provide a definition for it. I have no idea what it means. I guess it means "give credit by providing the name." Maybe?

arundelo• 9 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doxing

neogodless4• 9 years ago

Ah - while it's technically slang, it is defined in the dictionary - https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dox

My bad!

sillysaurus32• 9 years ago

dox = reveal identity. Nothing more complicated.

neogodless4• 9 years ago

Thanks - I deserve a dig for not googling it. It's a pet peeve to see acronyms that aren't defined, but this is apparently a "common" word that I just happened to be oblivious to!

lmkg• 9 years ago

It publicly releasing the IRL identity (name, address, etc) of the person behind an anonymous online identity. The term applies more to places like reddit/twitter/4chan than to someone's own blog, but it's generally considered a form of harassment because it's an invasion of privacy.

neogodless4• 9 years ago

Ah! I didn't realize it was an English dictionary word. I really thought it was an "inner circle" term that needed defined for the layperson. My mistake.

zitterbewegung• 9 years ago

The Media likes to have gripping headlines that create celebrities . Presenting a person as a Hero is a tried and true way to do this. Once you do that to a person the hazards of being a celebrity pop up . Doxxing from media and anonymous , people digging up dirt on you etc... it is an unfortunate situation and it's ruined many people's lives .

throwaway_ques• 9 years ago

What does "dug through a ton of OSINT" mean?

Also can anyone point me to resources on preventing doxing while hosting a website? I want a checklist of things that can possibly leak my identity. For example:

- Some basic stuff is use whoisguard and don't reuse any existing hosting / cloud infrastructure or even google analytics accounts

- But for new accounts, does using real credit card information matter? I am not sure how easily a company will give that information up. For example how hard is it to social engineer or get a court order/subpoena for it?

- Even then you can still be fingerprinted by ip, browser agent, hardware if you ever even log in with the same computer. For example HN certainly knows who my alts are just by checking request logs ip.

- What about sharing similar coding style / code base? Or even just speech/writing patterns? Is NLP sufficiently advanced to fingerprint you by that yet?

Are some of these too paranoid? I really think there's no way to fully prevent doxing for anyone sufficiently motivated. What's actually good enough in practice?

m0tive• 9 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_intelligence

MichaelGG• 9 years ago

Use Tails or Whonix. Buy Bitcoin with cash via mail on Localbitcoins.com. Depending on your level of paranoia, don't use bills directly withdrawn from the bank/ATM.[1] Be careful to not get fingerprints/hair/traceable writing on the envelope. What I've done is ask someone at the store (buy a card/envelop at CVS or something) to write the address for you. With BTC-via-mail, the only thing you leak is a rough physical location. Running the coins through Monero or something should blind things and render all this moot, but hey just in case?

With anonymized currency, then you're free to start signing up for stuff. If a site doesn't accept Bitcoin, use Localbitcoins.com to buy a prepaid debit card (Visa/Mastercard). If a site insists on a phone number for confirmation, use a darknet market to buy a pre-made Google Voice account. You can't access it over Tor or it'll get blocked, so use darknet markets to rent a Windows client box ($10-20 a month) so you have a "clean" IP and Google won't block you.

Then it's a matter of not giving away your info. You should adopt an entire persona when you're doing anything related to your site. Come up with a backstory (name, location, etc.). Ideally, none of this would matter: You're over Tor and using an entirely separate system for everything related to the site. But from the indictments I've read, it seems like a lot of first steps in finding someone's ID are just going off small hints. The way they write, mentioning the weather, etc. I would assume it to be very effective to fake these things. (For instance, notice a flood in a part of the country. Stay offline during the flood. When you get back on, write a small note that you had to be away due to flooding.)

None of this will protect you from an adversary that can correlate your home-connected-to-Tor times with site-gets-updated-times. But it'll stop people without that access, even if they're willing to fake a subpoena/warrant/etc. to your registrar/hosting provider (easier than you'd think). And hell, it doesn't always take a legal order to get those details; social engineering can do it just fine.

The Whonix wiki goes into lots of details on all this: https://www.whonix.org/wiki/DoNot

1: I asked Wells Fargo and they claimed they don't keep track of serial numbers and have no way to do so, but it seems so trivial I wouldn't believe it.

nl• 9 years ago

While perhaps (probably?) all the criticism of the papers is justified I'd note that the subject of the doxing doesn't seem very concerned about it at all.

ianai• 9 years ago

I hope instead of focusing on the doxing, people focus on employing and protecting him from threats. You can't count on keeping a secret forever.

cpncrunch4• 9 years ago

To the hacks at The Telegraph, MalwareTech will always be some sad basement-dwelling hacker nerd.

No, actually. They're showing that he fits into the archetypical British bedroom hacker/programmer genius, which is very highly respected in the UK, and produced the likes of Matthew Smith, David Braben, etc. It looks like the author of this article wasn't around in the 80s, so perhaps he's not familiar with this history.

edit I fit into this category myself, and I'm not offended at all.

stuffedBelly• 9 years ago

It’s obvious that he just wants to be left alone to get on with what he enjoys – hacking shit, and figuring out how stuff works

No, he wants to be left alone because it endangers his life to reveal his identity. Jesus, do people seriously expect someone that's done heroic deeds like this to jump out and scream "I am Batman"???

stagger87• 9 years ago

The author talks about this further down in the article.

powera• 9 years ago

Despite all the claims of "major cyber-attack", what I see here was a virus that infected the entire British NHS, but otherwise had very little impact.

asveikau• 9 years ago

I agree with this article, but though I am no expert in this topic I do wonder how much the wannacry perpetrators would actually go after this guy. Consider:

1. The fact that it was disabled so trivially was ultimately their own fault.

2. As we have seen, it was easy enough for them to change the logic to remove the web request on the nonexistent domain and start spreading again.

3. Retaliation would not be without cost and risk. Acting on #2 instead is a less costly, less risky action.

YeGoblynQueenne• 9 years ago

> The Telegraph talks a little bit about how he’s self-taught, and how he stopped WannaCry by figuring out it had a kill-switch.

The reasearcher's blog (posted on HN earlier) said that although originally he thought it was a kill switch he now thinks it was just a clumsy attempt at detecting whether the worm was runnign inside a sandbox.

Apparently, worms will often do that sort of thing- call out to an unregistered domain to check whether they get a response indicating that they're not really connected to the internet. Except the ones that do it right call out to some random domains and this one had it hard-coded (either because the creator of the worm was a numpty or because they forgot it) (and therefore, a numpty).

So it probably wasn't a kill-switch in the sense of a failsafe, as it was reported in the press.

pvaldes• 9 years ago

If we think about it, this is not much different than shouting publicly the name of a journalist infiltrated in a drug cartel. Terrible. Journalists should know better the game and what is at stake here.

retrogradeorbit• 9 years ago

"no good deed goes unpunished"

Doxing the hero who stopped WannaCry was irresponsible and dumb

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