A New Zealand hacker is being investigated as part of an international cyber crime operation involving the FBI. Photo / Reuters

A New Zealand hacker is being investigated as part of an international cyber crime operation involving the FBI. Photo / Reuters

An 18-year-old Whitianga man is at the centre of an international cyber crime operation.

The New Zealander, who goes by the cyber ID 'AKILL', is currently being interviewed by police and an expert from the FBI.

He is thought to be the ringleader of an international botnet group called A-Team, and has been named as a co-conspirator in a large-scale cyber attack in the United States.

Further suspects were spoken to in Northland and Canterbury, but Waikato Crime Services Manager, Detective Inspector Peter Devoy says it appears that those were victims rather than co-conspirators.

AKILL is alleged to have been one of those behind a concentrated DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack at a Philadelphia university in February last year.

Denial of service attacks involve sending huge numbers of transactions to a server, overloading it and stopping it being able to perform normal duties.

FBI records state that Ryan Brett Goldstein, 21, of Pennsylvania was indicted early this month by a federal grand jury over the botnet attack on a major Philadelphia university.

It is likely that the FBI will move to extradite the young New Zealand hacker, but Devoy says that a decision either way will wait until the completion of the investigation.

It is understood that an exchange of information between the United States Secret Service, New Zealand Police and the FBI led the investigation to this country.

"Tentacles from their case were leading back down here," said Devoy, "it just highlights that the internet really is shrinking the world."

He says that police are so far unaware how many potential victims there are in New Zealand.

"We're not sure yet of just how much malware has found its way onto computers here - so it's hard to tell just how much contamination there has been.

Devoy admits that police were taken aback by the age of the hacker.

"We were quite surprised - this is quite new to us and we're very much looking and learning - it is a real learning curve."

The FBI investigation is part of an operation called Bot Roast II, the second phase of an operation earlier this year targeting botnets and their controllers, botherders.