Secondly, and fortunately for the victims, the attackers had also unwittingly baked a kill switch into their code. Within hours of the attack, a twenty-two-year-old British college dropout named Marcus Hutchins discovered that he could neuter the attacks by redirecting victims’ servers away from the attackers’ command-and-control server toward a web address he bought for less than $11. By redirecting WannaCry’s victims to his own benign site, Hutchins stopped the attacks cold.
