Pizza-loving surfer who beat the virus warns of more IT attacks
THE 22-year-old IT expert hailed a hero for slowing the spread of the cyber attack yesterday warned the hackers were trying to find a way around his fix.
The keen surfer lives in an English seaside town and is known only as MalwareTech – a reference to the harmful computer software which he fights.
The self-taught tech whiz prevented more than 100,000 computers across the globe from being infected by registering a website domain name that unexpectedly stopped the spread of the virus.
Despite being on a week’s holiday from his computing job, he searched for a weakness in the hack software and found a reference to a website address that nobody owned.
He purchased it, knowing this was a regular way to track a computer infection, but had not expected it to actually halt the spread of the ransomware.
However he warned that a Chinese hacker appeared to be trying to buy the web address to thwart his efforts and they could upgrade the virus to remove the ‘kill switch’.
Although he has not been named, he frequently posts on social media about his love of surfing, pizzas and Pokemon. He shares photos from the ‘malware lab’ – a room full of computer screens and servers – he built in the home he shares with his parents.
He did not go to university because he was offered a job in computer security. He works for a ‘private intel threat firm’ based in Los Angeles, but still lives in England.
He told the Mail yesterday that he got into computing at school, saying: ‘When I was younger schools would have these parental controls which prevented you from browsing any non- educational sites. IT lessons are boring and you want to go on games so we used to try to bypass those and that’s what got me interested in security.
‘My GCSEs were not great. I wasn’t really a fan of school, I spent most of my time avoiding lessons and learning about computers instead. I didn’t go to university because there was an error with my grades. I ended up taking a gap year because I had no choice because my grades hadn’t arrived. In that year I started blogging and my blog caught the eye of the company I work for now, they just offered me a job and I never ended up going to university.’
He went on: ‘Mostly what I do is tech but I also do surfing and a bit of travelling. I tend to go places for work and then I take a couple of days to go to the seaside.
‘I work as much as I want to work, essentially. I’m only a fan of pizza because I can ring and it turns up, whereas if I cook something I have to spend 20 minutes cooking.’
Yesterday the young man issued a stark warning that hackers could upgrade their software, known as WannaCrypt.
‘Version 1 of WannaCrypt was stoppable but version 2.0 will likely remove the flaw.’ he wrote on Twitter.
He also believes there might be a ‘backdoor’ in the program, meaning hackers could easily inject a new strain of the virus.
He and a team of analysts are now attempting to track the hackers and investigating the possibility of a second wave of attacks.
But he warned last night: ‘There is a good chance I might not be able to shut down the next one.’
‘I might not be able to shut down the next one’