WannaCry attack hero Marcus Hutchins arrested for creating, selling malware

The security community reacted with surprise and skepticism over the arrest of one of its stars

A British security researcher, who became an internet hero after he was credited with stopping a malicious software attack this year, was arrested at the Las Vegas airport and charged in connection with a separate attack.

Marcus Hutchins, the researcher, was widely praised for identifying a way to disable the WannaCry malicious software, or malware, attack that seized hundreds of thousands of computers this year. Researchers credited Mr. Hutchins’s discovery of a so-called kill switch in the malware for stopping its spread and preventing the attack from infecting millions more computers.

According to an indictment filed in federal court in Milwaukee that