Humans.org.nz Home

You don’t want to go around diagnosing strangers, but it wasn’t hard to think of the A-word when the stories broke this weekend around the police searching the Whitianga home of 18 year-old Owen Walker. Solitary, sensitive, home-schooled after being bullied — and, of course, good with computers.

Now, his mother, Shell Moxham-Whyte, has confirmed to the Herald that Owen is Asperger. My thoughts are with her and the family, not least because we have an Asperger teenager with an affinity for computers and an inability to cope with school in our house too. He’s five years younger than Owen, and demonstrates a peculiar combination of intellect and unworldliness.

(We were reminded recently of his deficits when he set out recently for a friend’s place and got lost on a simple route. I was inclined to let him go, even though his cellphone battery was dead, because it was such a welcome and unusual initiative on his part. He turned up an hour later wondering what all the fuss was abut.)

I’ve dealt with “script kiddies” before, as an IT journalist, and more than once I’ve detected an inability to fully perceive the impact of their actions. I suspect that will be the case here.

Let’s not be under any illusions: botnets are bad. They are networks of PCs compromised via a virus or Trojan software so that they can be invoked and remotely controlled by one or more “bot herders”. Typically, they can be marshalled to send spam, visit websites en masse (to commit “click fraud” by scamming the Google Ads system with millions of fake visits) or, most often, to conduct distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks, which involve bombarding and crippling target servers with malformed requests for data.

It seems that it is the last of those we’re looking at here. Statements from the FBI have been confusing and somewhat lurid, but it appears that Owen hasn’t personally profited, and that the $20 million figure making headlines around the world is an estimate of the “economic loss” caused by attacks, including one on a server at the University of Pennsylvania.

These estimates should be taken with a grain of salt. They’re usually compiled by counting the use of computer security resources that would exist in any case, by agencies that want to look like they’re fighting the good fight.

But it would be wise to consider that the other young man indicted in the case, 21 year-old Ryan Goldstein, is still attending the University of Pennsylvania, where a spokesman has described damage arising from his actions as inconvenient but not irreparable.

If, as “AKill” (a nom de guerre taken from the “automatic kill” command used to knock unwanted participants off IRC chat channels), Owen really has created a Trojan that can wriggle past current anti-virus and firewall software, that suggests he’s very talented. It doesn’t make him an evil mastermind.

He has a whole world of trouble coming down on him now. But it might be useful if the people who have to deal with him could remember that he’s not just a lawbreaker. He’s also a kid who got lost on a straightforward journey.