Michael Field March 24, 2009 - 9:50AM
TelstraClear, Telstra's New Zealand subsidiary, has hired one of the worlds best known hackers - a teenager known as "Akill".
Nineteen-year-old Owen Thor Walker became the subject of a US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) cyber crime investigation spanning the United States, Europe and New Zealand and dubbed "Bot Roast".
New Zealand police finally caught him last year and he admitted to being the ring-leader, code-named Akill, of a group known as the A-Team.
Starting as a 16-year-old at school, Mr Walker designed and planted "botnets" which are a network of hacked computers able to be controlled via the internet by a single computer.
He came up with a system that beat anti-virus software, it spread automatically and it destroyed rival bot codes.
His botnet reached at least 1.3 million computers.
He pleaded guilty to six cyber crime charges but when he ended up in the High Court in Hamilton Justice Potter did not convict him but ordered him to pay a share in damage caused to hacked computers and to stay off computers.
She heard he had been diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome, a mild form of autism often characterised by social isolation, when he was 10.