Owen Thor Walker, 18, supposedly led a group of hackers globally, who used his programmes to access personal data, dispatched viruses around the world and committed many cyber crimes, causing losses of around $20 million, said the police.

The court in Thames, which is located near the south of Auckland, declared him as guilty in six cyber crimes and ordered to reappear on May 28 for sentencing.

Owen showed no emotion and he didn’t speak anything during the trial after declaring guilty through his lawyer to the accusations filed against him, which may carry a maximum punishment of up to seven years imprisonment.

Owen, who learnt computer programming himself, used the online name “Akill“, to commit the cyber crimes. He had started committing cyber crimes early last year and continued till the end of 2007, said the prosecution summary.

Owen was suffering from Asperger’s syndrome, a mild form of autism. He had succeeded in designing an encrypted virus that cannot be detected by anti-virus software and earned nearly 40,000 dollars from selling it, said the police.

The money which he earned through the sales of these malicious software tempted him to do further experiments with it and he finally succeeded in developing his own code. Then he continuously started to develop and redesign it.

Experts and cyber-crime officials consider Owen’s programming as the most advanced and powerful which they had encountered, said the prosecution summary.

Owen Walker who also worked online as “Snow Walker” and “Snow Whyte,” controlled his network using computer servers outside New Zealand, mainly in Malaysia, either leasing server space or by illegally accessing the servers.The exact number of computers which were affected by these virus programmes may never be known, the prosecutors said.

Owen’s software is able to access the user names and passwords, as well as the details of debit and credit cards, and can be misused by other criminals.New Zealand police gave their full cooperation to the FBI as well as Dutch authorities to catch the network.

Owen was staying along with his parents while committing these crimes, but they believed he was doing a legal computer programming work, said the police statement.

The cases filed against him includes creating malicious software which allows unauthorized access to computer systems, infecting networks, unauthenticated access to the computer for financial gain.

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