Walker, 19, had been facing possible jail time for running a massive botnet that infected as many as 1 million computers, but in July he caught a big break. That's when a New Zealand judge ordered him to pay a fine after he pleaded guilty to hacking charges.

Last year, Walker was busted in a joint New Zealand/U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation operation called , which landed one of his associates, 22-year-old University of Pennsylvania student Ryan Goldstein, in prison.

Now working for a small New Zealand software company, Walker has become a minor celebrity in his home country. He was this week on New Zealand's TV3 60 Minutes program, which described him as "the teenage boy with a brain that's one in a billion."

Walker, who was known online as Akill, and in his hometown of Whitianga as Snow, comes across as a typical geek in the report. An early reader who loved books, he was diagnosed with Asperger syndrome as a child. He was teased so mercilessly at school that his mother eventually decided to home-school him. By 15, he was drawn to computer programming and was often spending eight to 10 hours on the computer after school.

He eventually branched into malware because he found it "really interesting," and he "didn't have a lot else to do at the time," he says in the interview.