AKill "one of the worlds best known hackers" ... lol

Im just posting this in response to the news article about Telstra (New Zealand ISP) hiring convicted botter Owen Thor Walker aka AKill.

Now AKill if your reading this, no offense...

AKill wrote AKBot an IRC DDoS bot written in C++
There are a few variants going around, but chances are it was just another rx rename.

AKill (age 18 at the time) was caught & convicted as a part of the FBIs "Operation Bot Roast".
Now AKill apparently infected an estimated 50k PCs, (Ref) and did an estimated $26 million+ in damages. He also installed Adware and made approx $40k and (accidently) DDoS'd the University of Pennsylvania (see further below) aswell as DDoS'ing some other targets.
AKill managed to get off pretty lite, he had to pay $14.5k (fine & fees) and got NO jail time and NO criminal record.

The reason for this:

"Judge Judith Potter acknowledged his [AKill] high level of skill and said a conviction could jeopardise his prospects, saying he has a potentially outstanding future ahead of him."

Now alot of the above is linked in with Ryan Goldstein aka Digerati.

To summarise what happened with Digerati:
Digerati (age 22 at the time) was in TeamLoosh, he fell out with "rofles" (TeamLoosh leader?), 'rofles' then started a campaign against Digerati posting his personal info and accusing him of being a pedo (which turned out true) all over the net, mainly anywhere Digerati posted. In revenge Digerati "hired" AKill to launch a DDoS attacks against against a numbber of targets including: TAUNET, and LCIRC (Ref).

Digerati went to the University of Pennsylvania and gained access to another students username & password(s); He then supplied these details to AKill so he could update his bots. When AKill updated all his bots (all 50k of them) this caused an accidental DDoS and alerted staff at University of Pennsylvania who reported the 'attack' to the FBI.

Whilst this was all going on, the feds "Operation Bot Roast" was in full swing, logging all IRC/Forum chatter from known feeds. This chatter also most probably included the conversations between Digerati & AKill (as they quote Digerati a number times).

So... Owen Thor Walker aka AKill, would I describe him as "one of the worlds best known hackers"? I would say hes best known for getting caught and getting away scot free. A number of sources from 'the underground' report he snitched on Digerati and pushed the blame onto him, which obviously worked far better for the FBI: Digerati was a US citizen, and was a "known trouble maker". For his troubles he got 90 days is prison, 90 days in a "half way house" and 180 days house arrest and was banned from using computers for 5 years (unless it was for work or school). Nothing happened in regards to the 1000+ child porno pics he had.

It would have been a very hard case to extradite AKill to the US for conviction:
AKill left school at the age of 14 due to bullying, and was home taught; He had no friends, no social life which caused him to gain Aspergers Syndrome (a disorder in the same family as autism, characterised by very poor social interaction (thx google)), he was also 18 at the time of his conviction, so putting a 'boy' like that into jail would have ended up making him somebodies bitch for the next 7-10 years.

End of the day, AKill & Digearti acted like kids and thats what got them caught.

Would I hire him? Hell no. He is no different to the rest of the script kiddies which argue on the internet.

The best known hackers are the unknown hacker, the ones who dont get caught.

D3ADLiN3

BBC Botnet

Incase you didn't see it, check this out then read on: "BBC team exposes cyber crime risk."

When I saw this on TV I was like LOLOMGWTF...W.T.F!?!?!

OK to summarise what happened:
The BBC purchased a live working 20,000+ strong Botnet for $2000, they then demonstrated its abilities buy spamming a Hotmail & Gmail account, then DDoS'ed PrevX test website (with permission), then set the users wallpaper to a custom wallpaper to inform the users they have been infected and then 'disabled' the botnet.

Now to me... this is slightly illegal... and stupid...

Now when have the BBC (or PrevX) been above the law? and when did they all of a sudden gain great knowledge about Malware etc and knew that what they were doing was having no ill effect on the uninformed victims?
If the consortium of companies such as FSecure, Microsoft, ICANN etc decide they can not do anything about the conficker botnet which grew to a size of estimated 10 million+, what the hell does the BBC think there doing? Some comments people said was "yes its a good thing the BBC disabled the Botnet"... WTF. Seriously. I would have no problem with Microsoft & Co disabling and removing conficker from my PC rather than the inexperienced BBC, but no, they decided not todo it because it would be illegal.
So firstly the BBC funded criminals (and potentially terrorism), they then flood 2 email accounts (I take it they didn't get permission from GMail or Hotmail before doing so) causing unnecessary load on the ISP & victims PC, then they DDoS'ed PrevX (I think this made PrevX looks really stupid and unprofessional) and whay happens if one of the victim pays there Internet by bandwidth? So they have potentially cost the victims money. Next they change the victims wallpaper which is again against the law.

My favourite quote is this:

"If this exercise had been done with criminal intent it would be breaking the law."

IT WAS BREAKING THE LAW, YOU ILLEGALLY ACCESSED PEOPLES COMPUTERS WITHOUT PERMISSION.

God damn it makes me rage writing this... The BBC gets away with it. Now if I demonstrated to one of my customers using the above methods, how long would it be until I had a call from the police?

Well shit next time I get a call from the popo I know what to say "If this exercise had been done with criminal intent it would be breaking the law."