Crime in Cyberia: an incomplete list of offenders

• An 18-year-old resident of Hamilton, New Zealand, was arrested in an FBI swoop. He was accused of selling a programme he wrote to several criminal gangs. Detectives believe it could have been used to swipe a total of £10million from its victims. The boy was identified as “AKILL”, the kingpin of an international cyber crime network which stretched around the world. The programme he wrote allowed cyber criminals to “take over” other computers using the internet.

• Kevin Mitnick, often incorrectly called by many as god of hackers, broke into the computer systems of the world’s top technology and telecommunications companies Nokia, Fujitsu, Motorola, and Sun Microsystems. He was arrested by the FBI in 1995, but later released on parole in 2000. He never termed his activity hacking, instead he called it social engineering.

• Russian computer geek Vladimir Levin effected what can easily be called The Italian Job online — he was the first person to hack into a bank to extract money. Early 1995, he hacked into Citibank and robbed $10 million. Interpol arrested him in the UK in 1995, after he had transferred money to his accounts in the US, Finland, Holland, Germany and Israel.

•In 1990, when a Los Angeles area radio station announced a contest that awarded a Porsche 944S2 for the 102nd caller, Kevin Poulsen took control of the entire city’s telephone network, ensured he is the 102nd caller, and took away the Porsche beauty. He was arrested later that year and sentenced to three years in prison. He is currently a senior editor at Wired News.

A Pune software engineer was also included in the list. But, the name has been deleted as accused discharged on 15.10.2012 as no prima facie case of commission of an offence under Sec 66 of the IT Act disclosed in the chargesheet.