New Zealand: TelstraClear Hires Teen Bot Master

[Paul Ferguson <fergdawgster () gmail com>]

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Via The Age.

[snip]

TelstraClear, Telstra's New Zealand subsidiary, has hired one of the worlds
best known hackers - a teenager known as "Akill".

Nineteen-year-old Owen Thor Walker became the subject of a US Federal
Bureau of Investigation (FBI) cyber crime investigation spanning the United
States, Europe and New Zealand and dubbed "Bot Roast".

New Zealand police finally caught him last year and he admitted to being
the ring-leader, code-named Akill, of a group known as the A-Team.

Starting as a 16-year-old at school, Mr Walker designed and planted
"botnets" which are a network of hacked computers able to be controlled via
the internet by a single computer.

He came up with a system that beat anti-virus software, it spread
automatically and it destroyed rival bot codes.

His botnet reached at least 1.3 million computers.

He pleaded guilty to six cyber crime charges but when he ended up in the
High Court in Hamilton Justice Potter did not convict him but ordered him
to pay a share in damage caused to hacked computers and to stay off
computers.

[snip]

More:
http://www.theage.com.au/news/technology/security/telco-recruits-teen-hacke
r/2009/03/24/1237656891992.html

*sigh*

Boy, that'll sure discourage other teen bot masters, eh?

- - ferg

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-- 
"Fergie", a.k.a. Paul Ferguson
 Engineering Architecture for the Internet
 fergdawgster(at)gmail.com
 ferg's tech blog: http://fergdawg.blogspot.com/
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