Cyber factbox: Teens in the headlines 

New Zealand police are questioning an 18-year-old Hamilton teenager believed to be the mastermind of a worldwide computer hacking gang after a joint FBI investigation tracked the kingpin who allegedly helped crack 1.3 million computers and stole millions of dollars from victims' bank accounts.

Here are some other teenage hackers who have made headlines since the post-1980s rise in global cyber-crime.

Raphael Gray: The unemployed Welsh 19-year-old famously hacked Microsoft founder Bill Gates' credit card details and sent him a shipment of male anti-impotence drug Viagra in an online spree that ended with an FBI swoop on the teenagers' home village, in Clynderwen, west Wales in 2001. Sentenced to three years' community rehabilitation for stealing credit card information from thousands of people, Gray was later employed by a computer software company.

Kevin Mitnick: "Computer terrorist" Mitnick, one of the world's most famous computer hackers, reportedly started out hacking phone systems in his teens, before moving on to computers. He became a cause celebre after the FBI launched a three-year manhunt to stop him from breaking into networks and stealing software at companies including Sun Microsystems and Motorola. After serving an almost five-year stint in US jail in the 1990s, and copping an eight-year ban from surfing the web, Mitnick now travels the world advising companies on how to protect themselves from cyber crime.

The "Pentagon Hackers": In 1998 two California teenagers who mounted one of the most systematic hack attacks ever on US military computers were banned from possessing or using a computer modem, from acting as computer consultants, or having any contact with computers out of sight of "a school teacher, a librarian, an employer". Known as the "Pentagon hackers" the then 16 and 17-year olds who went by the codenames Makaveli and TooShort, were given three years probation for assaults on sensitive military and institutional computers.

Joseph McElroy: In 2004, the bespectacled British 18-year-old narrowly escaped jail after sparking a nuclear panic by hacking into a top secret US research centre. Hoping to use the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois's advanced network to download and store films and music from the Internet, the then 16-year old triggered a slow-down of the system that caused technicians to press "the panic button". Detectives at Scotland Yard traced the student to his East London home and he received a 200-hour community punishment order.

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