Kiwi hacker walks free from court

[fryguy2]

The Best part of this story is that the police are possibly going to put this kid on their payroll!!


-FROM vnunet.com
A teenager from New Zealand who had been accused of writing malware that could have stolen millions of pounds has walked free from court and may be recruited by the local police.

Owen Thor Walker, 18, also known online as “Akill," pleaded guilty to several cases of interfering with computer systems but despite his admission the case was discharged so that he will not have a criminal record. The court said it was taking the unusual step so that he could work with local police in fighting online crime.

Police have said that while he didn’t take money directly from people’s bank accounts he was paid $30,000 by persons unknown to write the malware that would do just that. The court fined him just $11,000 and seized the computers he had bought with his fee.

Both the prosecution and the defence team argued that he should be allowed to walk free and work with the police in the future. Justice Judith Potter said Walker was a young man with a potentially outstanding future in law enforcement.

Walker was caught as part of a crackdown by the FBI on botnets, networks of infected computers that can be used to either harvest banking data or be used in spamming or denial of service attacks. Eight other people have been charged as part of the investigation.

The news of Walker’s freedom will anger some in the computer security industry, who see the decision as unethical and likely to encourage others to follow in his footsteps. Antivirus firms in particularly take a very strong line in never hiring virus writers.

“It’s not something any reputable firm does,” said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos.

“The industry is very clear that it doesn’t hire criminals. In the case of antivirus they probably don’t even have the skills we need.”

Details of the group Walker had been working with have not been released since more arrests are expected shortly.

[Novaris]

Me from NZ, never knew this would go international. Although never doubted that he would go free.

[bball]

This is awesome, but why would they seize the computers he bought?

[qwerty]

I am glad they did this. i head of another story where two hackers hacked into their schools grading system and changed other peoples grades for some cash money. wen they caught they got prosecuted. i think that was just stupid. they should do what the justice department did here and hire them. i think u wold want them on ur side and not against u. they will only get better and smarter. next time u will not even be able to touch them. there are many stories like this through out the years. to tell u the truth, i think these people do it on purpose so that they can get instant jobs and get a lot of rep from getting caught. it is alot of free publicity.

[.sCREAm.]

Thats the best way to go from black hat to white hat and be set for life.

[plan19]

Originally Posted by fryguy2

The Best part of this story is that the police are possibly going to put this kid on their payroll!!


-FROM vnunet.com
A teenager from New Zealand who had been accused of writing malware that could have stolen millions of pounds has walked free from court and may be recruited by the local police.

Owen Thor Walker, 18, also known online as “Akill," pleaded guilty to several cases of interfering with computer systems but despite his admission the case was discharged so that he will not have a criminal record. The court said it was taking the unusual step so that he could work with local police in fighting online crime.

Police have said that while he didn’t take money directly from people’s bank accounts he was paid $30,000 by persons unknown to write the malware that would do just that. The court fined him just $11,000 and seized the computers he had bought with his fee.

Both the prosecution and the defence team argued that he should be allowed to walk free and work with the police in the future. Justice Judith Potter said Walker was a young man with a potentially outstanding future in law enforcement.

Walker was caught as part of a crackdown by the FBI on botnets, networks of infected computers that can be used to either harvest banking data or be used in spamming or denial of service attacks. Eight other people have been charged as part of the investigation.

The news of Walker’s freedom will anger some in the computer security industry, who see the decision as unethical and likely to encourage others to follow in his footsteps. Antivirus firms in particularly take a very strong line in never hiring virus writers.

“It’s not something any reputable firm does,” said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos.

“The industry is very clear that it doesn’t hire criminals. In the case of antivirus they probably don’t even have the skills we need.”

Details of the group Walker had been working with have not been released since more arrests are expected shortly.

Followed this case closely.... especially the thing that brought him down: a UPenn student named Ryan Goldstein, aka Digerati...

The Spin » Blog Archive » Penn student enters the matrix

A wannabe hacker who got kicked out of an IRC group frequented by a group called Splinter Security for being a pedophile:
http://www.scriptkitty.net/files/Digerati-Exposed.zip
[NSFW]

Whose teenage angst could not be contained... and hired a NZ skript kiddie named AKILL... who agreed to use his botnet to do a DDOS against TAUnet... as this would somehow make Splinter Security Group realize how much of a mistake they'd made in banning Ryan for being a pedo and beg for him back.

IN EXCHANGE FOR THIS: Ryan offered up some bandwidth on an engineering lab server so that AKILL could update the code on his botnet.

The way they got caught: As it turns out, people notice when your 40,000 node botnet tries to download an executable off of a server that normally sees no activity.... ALL AT THE SAME TIME. As it turns out, that server crashes, the traffic doesn't stop, people notice something's wrong and call the feds.

It's all quite funny.

[Chris]

Haha, sucker
Thats what you get, but why only $11,000 why not 20 million

[Nailz]

That's sic man.... in this case in dealing with malware, but if all of our smartypants get busted and flip the coin, who will get me my torrents to keep the family and friends happy? I sure as hell can't lol.