Julius Kivimäki, the Finnish member of Lizard Squad — who as a teen in 2015 was founded guilty on over 50,000 counts of computer system criminal activities — has actually been jailed once again in France.
Finnish cops verified the arrest on Friday in a news release specifying the suspect is being held by French authorities while they “immediately initiate measures to extradite the suspect to Finland.”
Finland’s cops service had actually provided a European arrest warrant for Kivimäki, who now passes the given name Aleksanteri, on charges of computer-related criminal offense and racketeering and extortion.
He was being looked for as part of an examination into a cyberattack targeting Vastaamo, a Helsinki-based personal psychiatric therapy center, that was revealed in 2020. As an outcome of the hack, which started in 2018, delicate client information was taken in addition to monetary info that was apparently fraudulently utilized.
After the organization declined to satisfy the wrongdoer’s extortion needs, specific clients dealt with needs that they pay up or have actually files associated with their delicate treatments exposed online.
Patient records were consequently published. The breach of Vastaamo and the industrial-scale extortion versus its customers “has deeply shaken Finnish society,” according to a feature-length report about the occurrence in the Christian Science Monitor, where it was referred to as “a watershed event for Finland.”
According to a main declaration from the Finnish cops last October, approximately 22,000 individuals reported getting such an extortion effort. Because of the a great deal of victims, the cops are acquiring victim declarations digitally. They had actually just gotten about 6,400 declarations when journalism release was provided.
The taken files were consequently submitted to the dark web. However, as reported by independent reporter Brian Krebs, the uploaded files likewise included a copy of the wrongdoer’s home folder, which “exposed a number of clues” indicating Kivimäki.
“The arrest is the result of long-lasting international cooperation and the police’s own information acquisition,” said criminal offense commissioner Marko Leponen from the Central Crime Police.
“The schedule of the extradition process depends on many factors, so at this stage it is challenging to estimate when the suspect will be brought to Finland. When the suspect has been handed over to Finland, a new detention hearing must be held in Finland. The goal is to interrogate the suspect as soon as possible.”
Kivimäki, who utilized the alias “zeekill” in Lizard Squad, has actually rejected the claims. He composed on his Twitter account last October, at the time the arrest warrant was provided for him, that he has actually not taken part in criminal activities given that he was a teen and said he deeply was sorry for those actions.
Lizard Squad was a well-known group of unsophisticated however destructive cybercriminals who were most active in late 2014. The worldwide group was consequently charged with occurrences such as DDoS attacks that removed both PlayStation and Xbox’s online video gaming services, in addition to for bomb risks versus an airplane carrying Sony Online Entertainment’s president, John Smedley.
