Teen architected mega-botnet

By Dave Nixon

The world has been reminded that the era of the teen hacker is a long way from over, with the arrest of a fresh-faced 18 year-old for supposedly masterminding a botnetting operation.

The New-Zealand-based accused, Owen Thorn Walker, is said to have been the principal of a group of programmers that initiated a botnet that contaminated 1.3 million computers with the intention of stealing credit cards and manipulating stock trades.

The FBI has put the losses caused by the Netherlands-sited botnet at $20 million, the majority of it siphoned from the bank accounts of victims across the globe. Walker, who operated under the handle ‘AKILL’, now faces up to 10 years in jail if found guilty under New Zealand law.

Conventional wisdom has it that the age of hackers hardly old enough to shave has conceded into history and that cyber-crime is now controlled by organised crime, motivated exclusively by money. This fails to perceive that young, talented hackers can be just as probable to be part of such crime groups as their older peers.

Nonetheless only days ago another teen hacker in the US pleaded guilty to using a similar botnet system to install adware on hundreds of thousands of PCs. The police referred to him as ‘B.D.H’, suggesting that the individual could be even younger than Walker, possibly below the age at which he could be tried under adult criminal law.

Authorities world-wide appear to be turning their legal concentration to the botnet problem at last, which has developed into the largest Internet security issue, beating even spam for malevolence.