Fundraiser for WannaCry researcher pulled after donations from stolen credit cards

A donation site for the legal defense of a well-established cybersecurity researcher facing charges over criminal malware is being pulled offline Tuesday after a hacker tried to donate money using stolen credit cards.

The site was raising money for Marcus Hutchins, whose work helped prevent substantial damage from the WannaCry malware that infected at least 300,000 systems earlier this year.

Hutchins was arrested in Las Vegas in early August. He is being charged in a Milwaukee federal court of designing and helping distribute the Kronos malware, which stole online banking usernames and passwords.

{mosads}

Security pro Tarah Wheeler and cybersecurity lawyer Tor Ekeland set up an online donation site to raise money for Hutchins’s defense. Ekeland is not representing Hutchins, who pleaded not guilty Monday, but offered the use of his firm’s payment system to take gifts. 

The credit card processor recently discovered that a hacker was using an automated program to attempt to make donations using stolen cards. 

“So we have to sort through what donations were legitimate and which were fraudulent,” Ekeland told Buzzfeed.

Ekeland promised Buzzfeed that all legitimate donations would still be sent to Huchins’s defense.