Police suspect that a cyber-attack that netted $20 million (£9.7 million) after infiltrating 1.3 million computers worldwide was masterminded by a shy teenager in New Zealand.

Martin Kleintjes, the head of the New Zealand police computer crime unit, said that the 18-year-old had written software that evaded normal antispyware systems, then sold his skills to international hackers. “He is very bright and very skilled in what he’s doing,” Mr Kleintjes said. “He hires his services out to others.”

He added that the youth, who is known by his cyber identification AKILL, was “one of the world leaders in terms of developing this sort of software – it’s absolutely first-class”. Mr Kleintjes said that the FBI regarded AKILL as the ringleader of an international “botnet-coding group” operating in the United States, the Netherlands and New Zealand that infected at least 1.3 million computers, causing an economic loss of about $20 million.

New Zealand police, tipped off by the FBI, raided the home of the teenager in the North Island city of Hamilton this week. The city has a population of fewer than 200,000 and is in the centre of New Zealand’s dairy farming district. Police took the youth into custody and seized computers, Mr Kleintjes said yesterday.

Detective Inspector Peter Devoy, the senior investigator in the case, said that the youth was released after questioning and had not been charged. “We’ve seized a number of computers and our investigations are focusing on the one seized from the 18-year-old,” Mr Devoy said. “It just goes to show when you step into the cyberworld it knows no boundaries.”

AKILL – whose real name has not been released because the police suspect that his offending began while he was still at school – and his accomplices are also suspected of being involved with an international network of hackers who allegedly assumed control of 50,000 computers at a Philadelphia university by using malware files, which infect computers.

The malware designed by AKILL used encryption that made it undetectable by antivirus software.

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