{“lastseen”:”2025-08-08T22:03:24″,”description”:”A new documentary series about cybercrime airing next month on **HBO Max** features interviews with Yours Truly. The four-part series follows the exploits of **Julius Kivim\u00e4ki** , a prolific Finnish hacker recently convicted of leaking tens of thousands of patient records from an online psychotherapy practice while attempting to extort the clinic and its patients.\\n\\nThe documentary, \\”_Most Wanted: Teen Hacker_ ,\\” explores the 27-year-old Kivim\u00e4ki’s lengthy and increasingly destructive career, one that was marked by cyber attacks designed to result in real-world physical impacts on their targets.\\n\\nBy the age of 14, Kivim\u00e4ki had fallen in with a group of criminal hackers who were mass-compromising websites and milking them for customer payment card data. Kivim\u00e4ki and his friends enjoyed harassing and terrorizing others by \\”swatting\\” their homes — calling in fake hostage situations or bomb threats at a target’s address in the hopes of triggering a heavily-armed police response to that location.\\n\\nOn Dec. 26, 2014, Kivim\u00e4ki and fellow members of a group of online hooligans calling themselves the **Lizard Squad** launched a massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack against the **Sony Playstation** and **Microsoft Xbox Live** platforms, preventing millions of users from playing with their shiny new gaming rigs the day after Christmas. The Lizard Squad later acknowledged that the stunt was planned to call attention to their new DDoS-for-hire service, which came online and started selling subscriptions shortly after the attack.\\n\\nFinnish investigators said Kivim\u00e4ki also was responsible for a 2014 bomb threat against former **Sony Online Entertainment President** **John Smedley** that grounded an American Airlines plane. That incident was widely reported to have started with a Twitter post from the Lizard Squad, after Smedley mentioned some upcoming travel plans online. But according to Smedley and Finnish investigators, the bomb threat started with a phone call from Kivim\u00e4ki.\\n\\n\\n\\nJulius \\”Zeekill\\” Kivimaki, in December 2014.\\n\\nThe creaky wheels of justice seemed to be catching up with Kivim\u00e4ki in mid-2015, when a Finnish court found him guilty of more than 50,000 cybercrimes, including data breaches, payment fraud, and operating a global botnet of hacked computers. Unfortunately, the defendant was 17 at the time, and received little more than a slap on the wrist: A two-year suspended sentence and a small fine.\\n\\nKivim\u00e4ki immediately bragged online about the lenient sentencing, posting on Twitter that he was an \\”untouchable hacker god.\\” I wrote a column in 2015 lamenting his laughable punishment because it was clear even then that this was a person who enjoyed watching other people suffer, and who seemed utterly incapable of remorse about any of it. It was also abundantly clear to everyone who investigated his crimes that he wasn’t going to quit unless someone made him stop.\\n\\nIn response to some of my early reporting that mentioned Kivim\u00e4ki, one reader shared that they had been dealing with non-stop harassment and abuse from Kivim\u00e4ki for years, including swatting incidents, unwanted deliveries and subscriptions, emails to her friends and co-workers, as well as threatening phonecalls and texts at all hours of the night. The reader, who spoke on condition of anonymity, shared that Kivim\u00e4ki at one point confided that he had no reason whatsoever for harassing her — that she was picked at random and that it was just something he did for laughs.\\n\\nFive years after Kivim\u00e4ki’s conviction, the **Vastaamo Psychotherapy Center** in Finland became the target of blackmail when a tormentor identified as \u201cransom_man\u201d demanded payment of 40 bitcoins (~450,000 euros at the time) in return for a promise not to publish highly sensitive therapy session notes Vastaamo had exposed online.\\n\\nRansom_man, a.k.a. Kivim\u00e4ki, announced on the dark web that he would start publishing 100 patient profiles every 24 hours. When Vastaamo declined to pay, ransom_man shifted to extorting individual patients. According to Finnish police, some 22,000 victims reported extortion attempts targeting them personally, targeted emails that threatened to publish their therapy notes online unless paid a 500 euro ransom.\\n\\nIn October 2022, Finnish authorities charged Kivim\u00e4ki with extorting Vastaamo and its patients. But by that time he was on the run from the law and living it up across Europe, spending lavishly on fancy cars, apartments and a hard-partying lifestyle.\\n\\nIn February 2023, Kivim\u00e4ki was arrested in France after authorities there responded to a domestic disturbance call and found the defendant sleeping off a hangover on the couch of a woman he\u2019d met the night before. The French police grew suspicious when the 6\u2032 3\u2033 blonde, green-eyed man presented an ID that stated he was of Romanian nationality.\\n\\n\\n\\nA redacted copy of an ID Kivimaki gave to French authorities claiming he was from Romania.\\n\\nIn April 2024, Kivim\u00e4ki was sentenced to more than six years in prison after being convicted of extorting Vastaamo and its patients.\\n\\nThe documentary is directed by the award-winning Finnish producer and director Sami Kieski and co-written by **Joni Soila**. According to an August 6 press release, the four 43-minute episodes will drop weekly on Fridays throughout September across Europe, the U.S, Latin America, Australia and South-East Asia.”,”published”:”2025-08-08T21:38:01″,”modified”:”2025-08-08T21:38:01″,”type”:”krebs”,”title”:”KrebsOnSecurity in New \u2018Most Wanted\u2019 HBO Max Series”,”source”:””,”references”:””,”id”:”KREBS:3B0618424087D8B7F2CFB7DA719D71B0″,”bulletinFamily”:”blog”,”cwe”:null,”cvelist”:[],”sourceData”:””,”sourceHref”:””,”cvss”:{“score”:0,”severity”:”NONE”,”vector”:”NONE”,”version”:”NONE”},”cvss2″:{},”cvss3″:{“version”:””,”vectorString”:””,”baseScore”:0,”baseSeverity”:””,”attackVector”:””,”attackComplexity”:””,”privilegesRequired”:””,”userInteraction”:””,”scope”:””,”confidentialityImpact”:””,”integrityImpact”:””,”availabilityImpact”:””,”cvssV3″:{“version”:””,”vectorString”:””,”baseScore”:0,”baseSeverity”:””,”attackVector”:””,”attackComplexity”:””,”privilegesRequired”:””,”userInteraction”:””,”scope”:””,”confidentialityImpact”:””,”integrityImpact”:””,”availabilityImpact”:””}},”href”:”https:\/\/krebsonsecurity.com\/2025\/08\/krebsonsecurity-in-new-most-wanted-hbo-max-series\/”,”category_name”:”News”,”post_link”:””,”product”:””,”version”:””,”vendor”:””,”ai_description”:””,”ai_severity”:””,”ai_vendor”:””,”ai_product”:””,”ai_version”:””,”ai_score”:0}<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
{“lastseen”:”2025-08-08T22:03:24″,”description”:”A new documentary series about cybercrime airing next month on **HBO Max** features interviews with Yours Truly. The four-part series follows the exploits of **Julius…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[6,8,12,119,13,33,7,11,5],"class_list":["post-10194","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-category_news","tag-cve","tag-cvss","tag-exploit","tag-krebs","tag-news","tag-none","tag-security","tag-tapic","tag-vulnerability"],"yoast_head":"\n