Julius “Zeekill” Kivimäki, a 25-year-old Finnish man charged with extorting an area on-line psychotherapy apply and leaking remedy notes for greater than 22,000 sufferers on-line, was arrested this week in France. A infamous hacker convicted of perpetrating tens of hundreds of cybercrimes, Kivimäki had been in hiding since October 2022, when he failed to point out up in court docket and Finland issued a global warrant for his arrest.
In late October 2022, Kivimäki was charged (and “arrested in absentia,” in accordance with the Finns) with trying to extort cash from the Vastaamo Psychotherapy Center. In that breach, which occurred in October 2020, a hacker utilizing the deal with “Ransom Man” threatened to publish affected person psychotherapy notes if Vastaamo didn’t pay a six-figure ransom demand.
Vastaamo refused, so Ransom Man shifted to extorting particular person sufferers — sending them focused emails threatening to publish their remedy notes except paid a 500-euro ransom.
When Ransom Man discovered little success extorting sufferers immediately, they uploaded to the darkish net a big compressed file containing all the stolen Vastaamo affected person data.
But as documented by KrebsOnSecurity in November 2022, safety consultants quickly found Ransom Man had mistakenly included a complete copy of their residence folder, the place investigators discovered many clues pointing to Kivimäki’s involvement. From that story:
“Among those who grabbed a copy of the database was Antti Kurittu, a team lead at Nixu Corporation and a former criminal investigator. In 2013, Kurittu worked on an investigation involving Kivimäki’s use of the Zbot botnet, among other activities Kivimäki engaged in as a member of the hacker group Hack the Planet (HTP).”
“It was a huge opsec [operational security] fail, because they had a lot of stuff in there — including the user’s private SSH folder, and a lot of known hosts that we could take a very good look at,” Kurittu instructed KrebsOnSecurity, declining to debate specifics of the proof investigators seized. “There were also other projects and databases.”
According to the French information web site actu.fr, Kivimäki was arrested round 7 a.m. on Feb. 3, after authorities in Courbevoie responded to a home violence report. Kivimäki had been out earlier with a girl at an area nightclub, and later the 2 returned to her residence however reportedly received right into a heated argument.
Police responding to the scene had been admitted by one other girl — probably a roommate — and located the person inside nonetheless sleeping off an extended night time. When they roused him and requested for identification, the 6′ 3″ blonde, green-eyed man offered an ID that said he was of Romanian nationality.
The French police had been uncertain. After consulting data on most-wanted criminals, they rapidly recognized the person as Kivimäki and took him into custody.
Kivimäki initially gained notoriety as a self-professed member of the Lizard Squad, a primarily low-skilled hacker group that specialised in DDoS assaults. But American and Finnish investigators say Kivimäki’s involvement in cybercrime dates again to no less than 2008, when he was launched to a founding member of what would quickly develop into HTP.
Finnish police mentioned Kivimäki additionally used the nicknames “Ryan”, “RyanC” and “Ryan Cleary” (Ryan Cleary was truly a member of a rival hacker group — LulzSec — who was sentenced to jail for hacking).
Kivimaki and different HTP members had been concerned in mass-compromising net servers utilizing recognized vulnerabilities, and by 2012 Kivimäki’s alias Ryan Cleary was promoting entry to these servers within the type of a DDoS-for-hire service. Kivimäki was 15 years outdated on the time.
The DDoS-for-hire service allegedly operated by Kivimäki in 2012.
In 2013, investigators going by way of units seized from Kivimäki discovered laptop code that had been used to crack greater than 60,000 net servers utilizing a beforehand unknown vulnerability in Adobe’s ColdFusion software program.
KrebsOnSecurity detailed the work of HTP in September 2013, after the group compromised servers inside knowledge brokers LexisNexis, Kroll, and Dun & Bradstreet.
The group used the identical ColdFusion flaws to interrupt into the National White Collar Crime Center (NWC3), a non-profit that gives analysis and investigative help to the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
As KrebsOnSecurity reported on the time, this small ColdFusion botnet of information dealer servers was being managed by the identical cybercriminals who’d assumed management over ssndob[.]ms, which operated one of many underground’s most dependable providers for acquiring Social Security Number, dates of start and credit score file info on U.S. residents.
Multiple regulation enforcement sources instructed KrebsOnSecurity that Kivimäki was chargeable for making an August 2014 bomb menace in opposition to former Sony Online Entertainment President John Smedley that grounded an American Airlines aircraft. That incident was broadly reported to have began with a tweet from the Lizard Squad, however Smedley and others mentioned it began with a name from Kivimäki.
Kivimäki additionally was concerned in calling in a number of pretend bomb threats and “swatting” incidents — reporting pretend hostage conditions at an deal with to immediate a closely armed police response to that location.
Kivimäki’s obvious indifference to hiding his tracks drew the curiosity of Finnish and American cybercrime investigators, and shortly Finnish prosecutors charged him with an array of cybercrime violations. At trial, prosecutors offered proof exhibiting he’d used stolen bank cards to purchase luxurious items and store vouchers, and took part in a cash laundering scheme that he used to fund a visit to Mexico.
Kivimäki was in the end convicted of orchestrating greater than 50,000 cybercrimes. But largely as a result of he was nonetheless a minor on the time (17) , he was given a 2-year suspended sentence and ordered to forfeit EUR 6,558.
As I wrote in 2015 following Kivimäki’s trial:
“The hazard in such a call is that it emboldens younger malicious hackers by reinforcing the already in style notion that there aren’t any penalties for cybercrimes dedicated by people beneath the age of 18.
Kivimäki is now crowing in regards to the sentence; He’s modified the outline on his Twitter profile to “Untouchable hacker god.” The Twitter account for the Lizard Squad tweeted the information of Kivimäki’s non-sentencing triumphantly: “All the people that said we would rot in prison don’t want to comprehend what we’ve been saying since the beginning, we have free passes.”
Something tells me Kivimäki gained’t get off so simply this time, assuming he’s efficiently extradited again to Finland. A press release by the Finnish police says they’re looking for Kivimäki’s extradition and that they anticipate the method to go easily.
Kivimäki couldn’t be reached for remark. But he has been discussing his case on Reddit utilizing his authorized first identify — Aleksanteri (he stopped utilizing his center identify Julius when he moved overseas a number of years in the past). In a publish dated Jan. 31, 2022, Kivimäki responded to a different Finnish-speaking Reddit person who mentioned they had been a fugitive from justice.
“Same thing,” Kivimäki replied. “Shall we start some kind of club? A support organization for wanted persons?”