An 18 year old Hacker from New Zealand with the alias “AKILL” have been arrested and put into custody by the police with the help of FBI, last night. He was accused of running a botnet of 1.5 million computers. the bot net was used to steal credit cards, manipulate stock trades and perform DDOS attacks of corporate computers. The FBI puts the combined loss of his activities to around 20 million dollars.

If convicted he could face upto 5 years in prison and 250,000 in fines.

More from BBC: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7120251.stm
Botnets: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botnet
Largest Botnets of them all: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storm_botnet