Last year, teenage Kiwi Owen Thor Walker landed a job with major New Zealand telecommunications company, TelstraClear. What makes the appointment somewhat unusual is that the 19-year-old had appeared in court the previous year on charges relating to his creation of a botnet that was used for various criminal purposes. According to Wikipedia:

          In 2008 he admitted to being the ringleader of an international hacking organisation estimated to have caused $26 million worth of damage.

Walker, known in underground communities as Akill, was apprehended as a result of FBI Operation Bot Roast and, while it seems that he didn’t personally steal any money, he was allegedly paid more than $40,000 by those who did. While Walker was handed a stiff fine by the courts, he managed to escape serving time in the chokey as the court deemed that a conviction could damage his potentially bright career.

According to TelstraClear, Walker was contracted to provide seminars to executives and customers and certain unspecified marketing services – but was never provided with access to their corporate network.

Some people see no problem with companies contracting the services of people such as Walker. For example, over at the National Cyber Security blog, Grey McKenzie stated:

          Whatever the motivation to hire Walker, it’s definitely a win-win situation … government and industry need to figure out a way to harness the power of computer hackers and the only way that seems feasible is to pay them what they’re worth.

I disagree. While I certainly don’t think that it’s wrong for people to be given a second chance, I do think that it’s wrong to permit a person’s criminal activities to boost their career. I mean, what sort of message would it be sending out were government and industry to harness the power of each and every criminal hacker by rewarding them with a lucrative contract? Would this act as a deterrent? I don’t think so.

And do you think that it would be right for other criminals to be offered similar career opportunities? Should rapists be paid to teach women’s self-defence classes? Should meth lab operators be paid to teach chemistry to high school students? No, of course they shouldn’t. Crime is crime and the people responsible for perpetrating it should be punished, not rewarded.

Some people seem to think that black hats are the best of the best; that they are capable of doing things that nobody else can and that it’s better to have them for us than against. But that’s simply not the case. There are many, many people who are every bit as skilled as  black hats – and who choose to work on the right side of the law.

To my mind, it would be entirely appropriate forcourts to ban people such as Walker from accepting any IT-related contracts for a specified period of time in order to ensure that they do not further profit from their crimes.

What do you think?