In Finland, a member of the hacker collective Lizard Squad named Julius Kivimäki has been convicted of a massive 50,700 crimes, which range from phishing, doxxing, swatting, DDoSing, as well as “instances of aggravated computer break-ins”. Beyond this there are also numerous other accusation, such as adding malware to 1,400 servers, creating a botnet to facilitate DDoSing, and incurring over $213,000 of damages to MIT and stealing over 7gb of their data. However, this 17 year old hacker who went by the name ‘zeekill’ online and whose twitter description reads ‘untouchable hacker god’ will not be seeing any jail time for his crimes. The BBC cite court documents that say that the verdict “took into account the young age of the defendant at the time, his capacity to understand the harmfulness of the crimes, and the fact that he had been imprisoned for about a month during the pre-trial investigation”. The teenager was given a two year suspended sentence, and ordered to ‘fight against cybercrime’. The teenager was as well forced to relinquish his PC, as well as hand over property obtained through criminal activities which amounted to over € 6000. The court as well ordered for his internet use to be monitored. All the crimes Kivimäki has been charged with occurred between the years 2012 and 2013, which was before the creation of Lizard Squad.
Lizard Squad is a hacking collective who have come to some notoriety in recent years. Most famously, Lizard Squad brought down both the Playstation and Xbox networks over the Christmas holidays, effectively disabling anyone from using those consuls to play online. Around that time Kivimäki (using the alias 'Ryan') was interviewed by Sky news and showed almost no remorse for what he had done.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPX8yCBdIZ8
This is a crime that, president of Daybreak Games John Smedley (then Sony Online Entertainment) reminds us, Julius Kivimäki has yet to be tried for. Smedley has recently taken to twitter to make some litigious claims, reminding the public that there are still 15 open cases against the hacker, as well as threatening to take him to civil court if necessary. In the past, Smedley has been a recipient of Lizard Squads attacks, including when he was doxxed, and on another occasion Lizard Squad called a bomb threat onto Smedley's plane, grounding it for several hours. It is rather understandable that Smedley is upset, and is considering all avenue's of attack against the Lizard Squad member.
https://twitter.com/j_smedley/status/618877964583768064
One wonders, however, is Smedley is not making things worse for himself.
https://twitter.com/j_smedley/status/619255048841760768
Kivimäki does not appear to be at all bothered by his sentence, or by the threats he is receiving. Two days ago, Julius retweeted a post from Lizard Squad’s account.
https://twitter.com/LizardLands/status/618560644145676295
