Teen hacker and criminal syndicate ringleader, "AKill," walks away from his trial with a small fine and no record. Supposed cybercrime experts deem his skills "among the most advanced" and the judge lets him walk.
This is a truly bizarre outcome for one of the first people nabbed by the FBI's Operation Botroast, an international police effort to find and prosecute the criminals responsible for the scourge of computer robot networks or "botnets" sending spam, phishing attacks and other malicious code to innocent web users around the world. Was he released because he is only 18 years old? Because he suffers from Asperger's Syndrome (a variant of autism)? Was it because he was prosecuted in his home country of New Zealand, far away from most of the victims? Victims who lost as much as 20 million dollars and included such institutions as the University of Pennsylvania?
He is known to have taken malicious code kits and combined them in unique ways. He is known to have worked with 8 other "script kiddies" and led them in their efforts to produce these programs. He is known to have purposely released the malicious code in order to steal money from spyware, embedded on the victim's computers. And now he gets off because he was clever? Oh, so we only want to put away the garden variety criminals. Glad this is getting explained now. Our society is so enamored of the criminal lifestyle (the film "Ocean's 11" come to mind) we celebrate even those who damage our way of life.
This is just wrong.