KEY POINTS:
There's little sign that Owen Walker, the teenager, even exists in his home town of Whitianga. Ask around the small seaside township about the 19-year-old hacker involved in a multi-million-dollar internet cyber-crime, and it's as though Walker lived in a separate world. Effectively he did.
The flaxen-haired boy who was bullied at school and nicknamed "Snow" disappeared into a cyberworld, fascinated by computers and what they could do. Walker, who turned 19 yesterday, has always been a loner, immature and under developed socially compared with other teenagers his age. His mother says he was diagnosed at age 10 with mild Asperger's syndrome, a form of autism often characterised by social isolation but great intelligence.
Walker's profile is that of a classic hacker - a kid who has trouble socialising, bullied at school, a loner, his computer becoming his world, his way of communicating, of testing a brilliant brain. One of his few friends is Richard Simms, an 18-year-old computer technician who works at Mercury Bay Area School, who accompanied him for his sentencing in the High Court at Hamilton last week. Walker, Simms and other young computer geeks from Whitianga meet for "LAN nights" to play computer games.
Locals would often see the slight, pale form of Walker, his long, lank, dark blond hair parted in the middle, walking along on his own. Those who knew him described him as quiet, "a geek", said one.
Local cafe owner Brad Percival, seeing Walker around town, wondered who he was.
"I'd see him walking up and down the street and always by himself. We always wondered who he was and what he did."
When Walker's face came on the TV news, many Whitianga locals finally figured out who he was.
Percival says many in the community who knew Walker's mother and stepfather well through their taxi business, Paradise Taxis, were shocked at the FBI's involvement.
Walker's mother, Michelle Moxham-Whyte, and her husband, Billy, were regular visitors at the cafe to buy coffee.
"I mean it was so close to home. It was almost exciting for us in Whitianga," Percival says.
Whitianga teenager Cora-beth Eginger, who went to Mercury Bay Area School with Walker, remembers him as being a loner. Known as "Snow" by the other kids, he was always on a computer at school.
Eginger says Walker was bright.
"He knew exactly what he was doing more than any of us, he was really talented in that area."
But he was taunted, and, by the age of 14, he had been pulled out of school by his parents.
"He was bullied by the 'cool' kids, especially the boys. Also because he was a computer geek. They were boys being boys but they were mean to him."
A class photo taken in Walker's final year at Mercury Bay in 2002 shows him in the back row, smaller than most of the other boys, with long flaxen hair. While the rest of his classmates are looking ahead at the camera, Walker is looking away to the right. Below he is listed as Snow Walker. It was to be his last class photo before he left the school and was home schooled.
Self-taught, he developed skills and knowledge which impressed even the FBI investigators who closed in on him. As he hit his mid teens he became increasingly fascinated by what he could do with computers.
To date Walker has lived a solitary life surrounded by people.
His parents ran their home as a bed and breakfast housing guests in additions built on to the house. And, outside, a fleet of taxis, part of a business owned by his stepfather and mother. It was this business that Walker invested $13,200 in, part of $36,174 he earned as payment for his illegal activities.
Alone in his room he taught himself about computers, becoming a brilliant computer programmer known on line as AKILL. He used the internet to communicate with the outside world, chatting on IRC forums with other computer programmers. He started experimenting with bot programs.
It was through an IRC chat forum that Walker met Robert Bentley, a Florida computer expert. He became close to Bentley, and they later collaborated over their offending.
When the police and an FBI agent arrived at his home with a search warrant in November 2007, Walker's mother had no idea what her son had been up to. The knock on the door was the culmination of an 18-month investigation involving the FBI, Dutch authorities and the New Zealand police. Police searched the house and seized Walker's computer equipment. It was AKILL that the FBI claimed was the ringleader of an elite international bot-net coding group responsible for infecting more than a million computers and causing $26 million in economic loss.
Suddenly Walker had gone from being an almost invisible computer nerd living in a small town to being internationally famous in the cyberworld.
Whitianga computer programmer Seba Illingworth, who offered Walker a part-time job with Trio Software Development to develop tourism software last year and still works with him, describes him as bright and a "nice kid".
"He's easy to work with, he is a lot of fun.
"Snow is a kid who didn't fit easily into society, but he didn't let that stop him. I mean, he found a passion, and that's cool."
Mercury Bay head boy Jordan Hamilton says he was not surprised to learn Walker had developed the bot-net code.
Hamilton says he is learning this year how hard it is to make bot-nets: "They're really hard. I couldn't do that."
Of Walker, he says: "I think he's pretty cool."
Hamilton got to know Walker this year at "LAN nights" at the local school.
"We get all the computers at school, and we all play games on them together. We have battles, and Owen is usually there."
At certain games, Walker is unbeatable.
"At some games he is, like, totally awesome, and you can't beat him."
