Owen Walker
New Zealand teenager, a.k.a. AKILL, who wrote botnet code during the FBI's Operation Bot Roast and got a job instead of a sentence.
Walker was 18 when New Zealand police arrested him in November 2007 as part of an international FBI push against botnets. He had written self-spreading malware that hid from antivirus and took orders over IRC; the network linked to him was estimated at more than a million machines and had been turned on, among others, a server at the University of Pennsylvania.
He admitted the charges, but in 2008 the judge discharged him without conviction on the grounds that a record would wreck a promising career. He paid reparations and was soon hired by the carrier TelstraClear. The ruling drew heavy criticism — it did send a clear message about where writing botnets could lead, just not the intended one.