Hello world, a hacker doxes himself by accident after perpetrating what
is probably one of the most awful hacks we’ve seen on this channel.
That’s the only topic we have for this video - as I’m away for the next week or so, in Mongolia of
all places. But anyway, let’s get into the video. A hacker has been charged for what is probably
the most morally bankrupt hack I’ve ever seen - and because of just how depraved it was, it’s
one of the few cyber attacks that has actually managed to find its way into mainstream news.
The story begins with Vastaamo which was a Finnish online therapy platform, think
betterhelp but for the Finns - people could use it to find a psychotherapist that they could talk to
over video call. But in 2020 they were hacked, a miscreant managed to steal a 10gb database
from the site containing… the confidential therapy notes of thousands of patients.
And, well you can probably guess where this is going… the hacker,
identifying as “ransom_man” on dark web forums said he’d release the data publicly, if Vastaamo
didn’t pay a ransom of 40 bitcoin. Until then he’d “gradually release [the] patient records,
100 entries per day”. And, as an extra kick in the teeth for people affected by this,
ransom_man revealed that he only managed to gain access to the MySQL database thanks to a default
password. So I guess this wasn’t even much of a “hack”. But either way the clock was ticking, and
day by day ransom_man released 100 more records. When it eventually became clear that Vastaamo
just wasn’t going to give him even a satoshi, he switched tactics, extorting individual patients
instead. Victims starting receiving emails demanding 200 Euros in bitcoin if they paid
within 24 hours, else they’d have to front up 500. But, when the extortion payments eventually
dried up, the inevitable happened, the cyber miscreant publicly posted the entire database,
consisting of thousands of people’s therapy notes. However - and buckle up for this plot twist,
because in publishing the database, ransom_man made a fatal, opsec, mistake. In the archive,
he accidentally included an entire copy of his home folder. Which contained things like his ssh
folder and details of his other “projects”. In his slip up he essentially doxed himself,
giving investigators enough leads to piece together who could be behind this.
And in the last couple weeks, one “Julius Kivimaki” has been added to Europol’s most
wanted fugitives list. This guy isn’t a newbie in the cybercriminal underworld,
he has a few skeletons in his closet, and when I say a few skeletons I mean a whole graveyard’s
worth. And - I’m not quite sure where to start with this… so, in 2015 at just 17 years old,
he “was found guilty of 50,700 "instances of aggravated computer break-ins".”, in addition
he was found to have used vulnerabilities in Adobe's ColdFusion software to create a botnet
of hacked ecommerce sites, in order to steal credit cards. He “was also accused of being
involved in a money laundering scheme”, “calling in multiple fake bomb threats and “swatting””,
and a bunch of other stuff, each accusation is honestly a rabbit hole in of itself. But the
most notable one is that this guy was apparently a member of “Lizard squad” - remember these guys?
The grinches that shut down the playstation network over Christmas in 2014. Julias,
aka “Zeekill” apparently even appeared on skynews in an attempt to justify the attack.
As of now, there’s a Europol warrant out for his arrest. What happened to Vastaamo? Well
they couldn’t cope with the backlash and have since gone out of business.
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As always, thanks for watching. We’ll be back to the usual format in a week or so. Until then