Finland’s Most-Wanted Hacker Nabbed In France
Kivimaki initially gained notoriety as a self-professed member of the Lizard Squad, a mainly low-skilled hacker group that specialized in DDoS attacks. But American and Finnish investigators say Kivimaki’s involvement in cybercrime dates back to at least 2008, when he was introduced to a founding member of what would soon become HTP. Finnish police said Kivimaki also used the nicknames “Ryan”, “RyanC” and “Ryan Cleary” (Ryan Cleary was actually a member of a rival hacker group — LulzSec — who was sentenced to prison for hacking). Kivimaki and other HTP members were involved in mass-compromising web servers using known vulnerabilities, and by 2012 Kivimaki’s alias Ryan Cleary was selling access to those servers in the form of a DDoS-for-hire service. Kivimaki was 15 years old at the time. In 2013, investigators going through devices seized from Kivimaki found computer code that had been used to crack more than 60,000 web servers using a previously unknown vulnerability in Adobe’s ColdFusion software.
Multiple law enforcement sources told KrebsOnSecurity that Kivimaki was responsible for making an August 2014 bomb threat against former Sony Online Entertainment President John Smedley that grounded an American Airlines plane. That incident was widely reported to have started with a tweet from the Lizard Squad, but Smedley and others said it started with a call from Kivimaki. Kivimaki also was involved in calling in multiple fake bomb threats and “swatting” incidents — reporting fake hostage situations at an address to prompt a heavily armed police response to that location.
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