A 17-year-old Lizard Squad hooligan has been convicted of 50,700 computer crime charges—but won’t see any jail time.
According to the Daily Dot, Finland native Julius "zeekill" Kivimaki has been given a two-year suspended prison sentence by a Finnish court, during which time he will have all of his online activities monitored.
Kivimaki was charged with a laundry list of computer crimes, including conducting data breaches, felony payment fraud, telecommunication harassment, and other counts relating to fraud and violations of company secrets. Most notoriously, he was instrumental in the massive distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on Microsoft’s Xbox Live and Sony’s Playstation Network over last year's winter holiday season.
Unfortunately, this is one kid who is unlikely to see the error of his ways, if his interview with the UK’s Sky News is any indication. When asked why he DDoSed the gaming services, he answered, “Mostly to raise awareness—to amuse ourselves.” He added, “I mean, I can't really be [inaudible] feel bad. I might have forced a couple of kids to spend their time with their families instead of playing games.”
He did say that the overall motivation was to point out gaping holes in gaming security.
"Also one of the big aspects here was raising awareness regarding the low state of computer security at these companies,” he told Sky. "Because these companies make tens of millions every month from subscriber fees and that doesn't even include purchases made by their customers. They should have more than enough funding to be able to protect against these attacks. And if they can't protect against the attacks on their core business networks then I don't think they're really doing that much on their overall level of security.
His Lizard Squad cohorts were also anything but contrite.
“All the people that said we would rot in prison don't want to comprehend what we've been saying since the beginning, we have free passes,” the group said defiantly via Twitter.
In a follow-up tweet, it added, “And no zeekill will not be extradited. Finnish citizens have the right to refuse extradition regardless of any treaty.”