KEY POINTS:
The photos show him standing in the dock, his bland, uniform-like shirt and long stringy hair suggesting Owen Thor Walker had received a release pass from school for the day.
But the 18 year-old "bot-herder", allegedly one of the ringleaders in an international cyber-crime network that infiltrated a
million computers and caused millions of dollars in damage, is old beyond his years when it comes to hacking.
In fact his cyber exploits, for which he was convicted in Thames District Court this week, make all the other hacking attacks that have come to light in New Zealand in recent years seem like child's play in comparison.
Walker, who profited from his hacking handiwork to the tune of $36,000, is no "script kiddie", as one hacker whose court case I attended a few years ago was labelled by a witness.
The police said Walker or "Akill" as he was known online, created code to infect computers that was "considered by international cyber crime investigators to be among the most advanced bot programming encountered".
We've had the occasional hacker join up with an international crew and spammers earn handsome returns sending unsolicited email around the world from here.
But Walker was in a league of his own, admired worldwide by shadowy associates he's probably never met face to face. Ironically though, his case is strangely similar to the ones that have come before.
Take a young, intelligent male who has either had instability in his home life or trouble socialising with his peers, give him a computer and an internet connection and it would appear you have the perfect conditions to create a teenage hacker.
Most of the hackers I've come across are young, bright if socially naive, middle class young men. They have wide social networks but they are largely built online in the shorthand of instant messaging conversations, forum postings and emails.
They are mischievous, cynical, impatient, self-deprecating. But they are intellectually curious. There's always the lure of money, but it is more the fun of breaking into a secure system, figuring out the exploits, working through the puzzle that drives them to do what they do.
Take the 2005 case of the Telecom voicemail hacker - I won't mention his name here as the 19-year-old is doing his best to leave his hacking past behind. Three years ago he found a way to hack into the voicemail boxes of 027 customers.
He was able to listen to voice messages left for politicians, including then-Auckland Mayor Dick Hubbard and then-head of Telecom's PR team, John Goulter. He tried to access my voicemail but I had a PIN number on it which prevented him from doing so.
He had the key to some potentially valuable and damaging information, but that didn't interest him, he was just happy he'd found a way into the system and wanted the world to know. He was in court soon after the story hit the headlines.
"While I was doing it, it was a bit of fun ... but when I got the knock on the door at six in the morning with a bunch of burly cops come to take my computers and me away, then it started getting a bit scary," he told the Herald in November when asked to comment on the Walker case.
The well-known hacker Jodi "Venomous" Jones had the same sort of personality: he was young and intelligent and mischievous. But in 2003, aged 23, his exploits landed him in court when he hacked into a small internet provider's accounts system, apparently because he didn't like an employee who worked there.
The desire to seek revenge is actually a major force driving hackers. It was a beef with Telecom that drove hacker Andrew Garrett to use the Back Orifice Trojan software to hack into the accounts of Xtra customers - he was convicted in 2001.
The same year "phone phreaker" Borislav Misic lost his appeal against his conviction for hacking into Telecom's phone network in 1998 when he was 22. His motive was different - he wanted to make free long-distance calls and ran up an $85,000 bill doing so.
All of these people could have gone on to command large salaries as software developers. Some of them still will, valued as hackers for hire by companies seeking to keep their online operations safe.
Walker, fundamentally, is no different from them. The whiz kid with Asperger's syndrome made money from his enterprises which were carried out on a much larger scale. But what drove him was intellectual curiosity gone wrong. He wanted to break the system and succeeded. He won't be the last to do so.
