Finnish prosecutors have charged a hacker on greater than 30,000 counts associated to allegedly breaching a Helsinki-based non-public psychotherapy middle.
The costs embody tried extortion and spreading info that violates non-public life, in accordance with a press release launched this week by Finland’s Nationwide Prosecution Authority.
Aleksanteri Kivimäki, 26, who was previously recognized as Julius Kivimäki, has denied any wrongdoing. The Finnish nationwide is presently in pretrial detention, awaiting proceedings scheduled to start in November. If discovered responsible, he may face a most of seven years in jail.
Throughout a press convention on Wednesday, the chief prosecutor within the case, Pasi Vainio, advised the Finnish media that Kivimäki’s case is among the most intensive in Finnish legal historical past.
Kivimäki allegedly hacked into the Finnish agency Vastaamo, which managed dozens of psychotherapy facilities all through the nation, in 2018, stealing the non-public therapy data of over 33,000 sufferers. Greater than 21,000 of them subsequently filed legal studies.
After stealing the data, Kivimäki allegedly tried to extort greater than $380,000 in bitcoin from Vastaamo and despatched extortion letters to sufferers, demanding funds starting from €200 to €500 (about $211 to $529) in trade for not releasing their remedy session data. When Vastaamo refused to pay, the hacker posted batches of affected person info, together with the data of those that have been youngsters on the time, on the darkish internet.
The stolen info was extremely delicate, together with sufferers’ social safety numbers, telephone numbers, and emails, in addition to medical doctors’ notes and transcripts of conversations between sufferers and psychological well being professionals.
Finnish media beforehand reported that the upcoming listening to will probably be “exceptionally giant” as as much as 500 victims linked to the psychotherapy middle hack have expressed their want to take part.
The district court docket has ordered that the identification of the people concerned be stored confidential because of the sensitivity of the problems.
A former member of the hacking group Lizard Squad, Kivimäki was arrested in February in France. Lizard Squad was most energetic in late 2014 and subsequently charged with incidents reminiscent of distributed denial-of-service assaults that took down each PlayStation and Xbox’s on-line gaming companies, in addition to for bomb threats in opposition to a aircraft carrying Sony On-line Leisure’s president.
As a teen in 2015, Kivimäki was convicted of over 50,000 counts of laptop crimes.
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Daryna Antoniuk
Daryna Antoniuk
is a contract reporter for Recorded Future Information primarily based in Ukraine. She writes about cybersecurity startups, cyberattacks in Japanese Europe and the state of the cyberwar between Ukraine and Russia. She beforehand was a tech reporter for Forbes Ukraine. Her work has additionally been revealed at Sifted, The Kyiv Impartial and The Kyiv Submit.
