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
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