Marcus Hutchins is a cybersecurity hero who managed to stop the WannaCry worm in its tracks back in 2017, but in doing so he turned his life upside down, and in this YouTube documentary we hear him tell his story first hand.

Hutchins became a cybersecurity celebrity overnight when one day he came back from lunch and saw the news about there being an attack on the NHS’s computer systems. This intrigued him, so he began to dig a little deeper, after managing to get his hands on a copy of the virus he set about studying it on a virtual machine where it could inflict no real damage. Whilst investigating he discovered that the virus was attempting to make a request to an unregistered .com domain. So out of curiosity, Hutchins decided to register this domain in order to track incoming connections, but in doing so he activated the kill switch, and just like that the WannaCry attack on the world was over.

It changed his life, he became a global hero but in just a few short weeks he would go from hero to zero. The national newspaper the Daily Mail had doxxed him, posting his address in the paper which meant he was now at risk from the very people he was fighting against. But it wasn’t just the scammers that would be interested in Hutchins, the FBI would also come knocking.

Directed by: Hugo Berkeley