July 15, 2015
On Wednesday the U.S. Justice Department announced a massive international bust of Darkode, an online black market for hackers.
Among those charged with crimes was Morgan Culbertson, a 20-year-old from Pittsburgh. He’s accused of creating a nasty malware that infects Android phones, steals data and controls the device.
Culbertson is currently a sophomore at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. He’s a two-time intern at the cybersecurity software maker FireEye where he’s been researching malware on Android smartphones, tearing apart viruses, and analyzing them.
According to federal investigators, Culbertson went on to create the infamous “Dendroid” malware. For $300, anyone who bought it could turn any legitimate Android app into malware. Buyers even got round-the-clock software support.