At 17, he was accused of more than 50,000 cybercrimes.
The 25-year-old Finn has been charged with extortion from a once popular, now bankrupt online psychotherapy company and its patients. Finnish authorities rarely name suspects during investigations, but they were willing to make an exception for Aleksanteri Kivimäki (aka Zeekill), a notorious hacker who, at the age of 17, was accused of more than 50,000 cybercrimes, including bank card theft, stalking using telecommunications and various data leaks. For all this, he was punished quite mildly - only two years in prison on probation.
At the end of October 2022, Kivimäki was charged (according to the Finnish authorities, he was also arrested in absentia, as he is abroad) in an attempt to extort money from the Vastaamo psychotherapy center. On October 21, 2020, Vastaamo became the target of blackmail when an attacker named "ransom_man" demanded 40 bitcoins (~€450,000 at the time) in exchange for a promise not to release confidential recordings of therapy sessions.
In messages posted on a Finnish-language dark web site, ransom_man stated that Vastaamo was unwilling to negotiate a ransom payment, which would cause him to start posting 100 patient data sets every 24 hours so that the company wanted to keep communicating with him.
But when the company refused to pay, ransom_man started extorting money from individual patients. Around 22,000 victims have reported extortion attempts directed against them personally, according to Finnish police. From each victim, the attacker demanded 500 euros.
On October 23, 2020, ransom_man uploaded a large archive to the dark web containing therapy records from all Vastaamo patients. But the archive also contained a copy of ransom_man's home folder, which helped investigators find a number of clues that point to Kivimäki. And even though the attacker quickly deleted the archive (accompanying it with the “oops” mark), several users managed to download it.
Among those lucky ones was Antti Kurittu, a team leader at Nixu Corporation and a former forensic scientist. In 2013, Kurittu worked on other crimes that Kivimäki committed as part of the Hack the Planet group. According to him, such a mistake on the part of a hacker is a huge failure in the field of operational security. In that folder, experts found a lot of useful information and databases.
According to Kurittu, all the people who have been investigating Kivimäki's crimes say that a notorious cybercriminal is also behind the extortion of money from Vastaamo.
In turn, Kivimäki denies all accusations on Twitter and believes that the Finnish authorities made this case public in order to influence the decision on his old cases.
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