Hacker Charged With Extorting Online Psychotherapy Service
Summary: A 25-year-old Finnish man, Julius "Zeekill" Kivimaki, was charged in late October 2022 with extorting the Vastaamo Psychotherapy Center and its patients, after a blackmailer called "ransom_man" demanded 40 bitcoins (about 450,000 euros) in October 2020 not to publish stolen therapy notes. When Vastaamo declined to pay, the extortion shifted to individual patients, with some 22,000 victims reporting attempts demanding 500 euros each, and a leaked archive that investigators say contained ransom_man's home folder and SSH keys pointed to Kivimaki.
What's compelling: Vastaamo's patient records sat in a MySQL database exposed to the web for 16 months behind an administrator account with a blank password, and roughly 22,000 patients were then personally targeted with 500-euro extortion demands over therapy notes that later surfaced on a searchable dark web site.
Read the original at Krebs on Security ↗
- Topics
- Data Breaches
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