I hate TV

Seriously, the absolute last thing they should be doing is putting that kid on TV. Quite frankly, all it's going to do is encourage all the other script kiddies. Despite the constant assertion of clueless TV reporters to the contrary, creating and managing botnets is neither difficult nor a sign of some kind of amazing insight into information technology. The software to do it is readily available and barely more difficult than installing itunes, just about any teenager who spends all their time in front of a computer could do it trivially, let alone people with actual training in the relevant areas.

The only difference between them and this kid is that they don't, because it's *wrong*.

There are people on the internet, many of them suffering from one form of social dysfunction or another, who are unable to empathise with others, and thus are happy to take advantage of them. This is not news, nor is it confined to the internet. Possibly the only news here in fact is that law enforcement managed to catch him. The people who are actually good at this aren't on TV, because catching them behind myriad layers of fakes, crypto and one-way lines of control is extremely difficult to coordinate, with control relays and cutouts in countries across the globe, often in uncooperative jurisdictions and in organisations with no IT staff. Fortunately for all of us he got greedy before he got better at it, and no doubt a money trail provided both better information and more motivation for investigators.

And will you all stop asking when he'll be offered a job? he didn't do anything that would make him more valuable than the risk posed by his clear ethical deficit. It's not like we (the IT profession) don't know how people like him achieve what he does, it'd be like asking someone who performed a standard smash-and-grab when the police were going to hire him for his insight into how it's done. It's a smash-and-grab, the police *know* how it's done, the difficulty is simply that it's not practical to secure everything against it - we rely on the fact that we catch most of them, eventually, and that the remainder of the population has some sense that it is cruel and unfair to do this kind of thing to others.

Personally, I wouldn't hire him over most half-decent coders his age - at least with the others there's a reasonable chance they won't think they're clever trying to install backdoors in your systems when you're not looking. Experience suggests it takes these fools another ten years minimum before they grow up and start to understand the kind of impact their idiocy has.