The 17-year-old who took down the Playstation and Xbox networks last year has been convicted of – count ’em – 50,700 offences, according to Finnish newspaper Kaleva, although not all are related to this particular attack.
These F I F T Y T H O U S A N D P L U S charges include: gross data breakthrough, harassment via telecommunications, serious fraud, gross violation of the secrecy of communications, and IT breakthrough.
Yet Julius Kivimaki – alias: zeekill – has been let off pretty damn lightly, getting a two year suspended sentence and monitoring of his web activity.
(Side note: just a big ol’ round of applause for Google Translate on the Finnish to English here.)
Kivimaki was ousted last year as being part of the Lizard Squad hacker network by cybercrime journalist Brian Krebs. It was with this group that Kivimaki took down the Playstation and Xbox networks last Christmas. Yeah. THOSE guys.
Previous attacks by the Lizard Squad include highly publicised ones on Facebook, Tinder, and Amazon. In 2013 they took the entirety of North Korea offline for 24 hours, and in January they hacked the Malaysia Airlines MH370 page to show “404 – Plane not found” with the group’s symbol of a lizard in a top hat
Lizard Squad are currently in full gloat mode.
Moral of the story: https://t.co/w3DvdvkQML
— Lizard Squad (@LizardLands) July 7, 2015
One of Kivimaki’s victims, Bail Strater, told the Daily Dot that he was “absolutely disgusted” by the ruling, citing that Kivimaki has been harassing his family and wreaking havoc on their finances and personal lives for years.
Another victim, CEO of Daybreak John Smedley, is straight up pissed. Lizard Squad took credit for grounding his plane via bomb threat last year, and now Smedley is using Twitter to rage.
that was the piece of garbage that brought my plane down, leaked my information and did all kinds of other crap to me.
— John Smedley (@j_smedley) July 8, 2015
It’s important to note – he was convicted of crimes that had nothing to do YET with the PSN DDOS over Christmas (yes he was part of that)
— John Smedley (@j_smedley) July 8, 2015
what they won’t tell you is he did time in jail already and got his ass kicked hard inside. @what_security – tell us that story Julius.
— John Smedley (@j_smedley) July 8, 2015
The FBI nailed this guy literally immediately. It took the Finnish government a long time to catch up.
— John Smedley (@j_smedley) July 8, 2015
His parents need to be held accountable for his actions in addition to his going to jail. @what_security – So I’m coming for you Julius.
— John Smedley (@j_smedley) July 8, 2015
Lizard Squad, however, gives approximately zero fucks.
stay mad @j_smedley, btw when’s your next flight? Just curious.
— Lizard Squad (@LizardLands) July 8, 2015
Note: Various media outlets wrongly reported that Kivimaki would have to fight cyber crime as part of his rehab, but that was a translation error initially made and then fixed by Daily Dot.)
Photo: Rich Polk via Getty Images
