KEY POINTS:
It made for a great news story this week. Teenage cyber genius given a let-off in court so that he could one day use his talents for good. The story of Owen Walker, aka Akill, made news all around the world.
As a 16-year-old, the Whitianga computer geek
was the leader of an international botnet coding group. For those of us born before 1980, and any latter-day Luddites, botnet is the term for a collection of software robots that run automatically and autonomously.
The term is most-often associated with malicious software that allows a hacker access to compromised computers. The person behind the botnet is known as the bot herder and he (it's usually a he) controls the group remotely.
That's what Owen Walker was - a bot herder who wrote the code, ran the botnet and did the transactions. According to an article on him in Computerworld, that makes Walker unusual.
Most cyber crime is outsourced and is conducted for huge financial profit. Experts think Walker was doing it for the challenge - in some ways, harking back to the golden years of computer programming when hacking was an intellectual exercise - one cyber geek trying to get past the security systems another geek had invented.
And certainly the judge presiding over Walker's sentencing seemed to think no great harm had been done. She believed Walker had acted out of curiosity rather than criminal intent and suggested he was a young man with the potential for an outstanding future.
She discharged him without conviction and ordered him to pay costs to the University of Pennsylvania.
Police seem happy enough with the outcome, although reports that Walker was let off so that he could work with New Zealand's cyber crime cops were incorrect.
But was he really some sort of cyber savant, a teenage wunderkind who had stumped international detection agencies?
Again, harking back to Computerworld, probably not. It quoted a US computer forensics researcher, Gary Warner, who said: "We haven't landed Moby Dick here. We haven't stopped a 'criminal mastermind'.
"We caught a few juveniles with anger management and social problems who attacked a university chat room because the boys there told another boy that he was not their friend any more."
Harsh summation, but possibly a little more accurate than the breathless news stories about the genius living among us that we've been hearing all week.
