Zeekill, a Lizard Squad Member Found Guilty of Hacking Sony’s PlayStation Network Servers

Lizard Squad Member Found Guilty Of Hacking PlayStation And Xbox Networks, convicted for over 50,000 cybercrimes

A teenager who played an integral role in the exceptionally large distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack in late December last year, which resulted in the shutdown of the PlayStation and Xbox networks for several days has been declared guilty of 50,700 offenses.

Julius Kivimaki, 17, also known as “zeekill” online, was let off with a slap on the wrist despite being a part of the Lizard Squad network, which has publicly acknowledged for major hacking attacks over the last few years.

A court in Finland has given him a two-year suspended sentence because he is a minor and has been ordered to fight cybercrime as part of his rehabilitation.

One of Kivimaki’s victims said he was harassed by him for three years and is “absolutely disgusted” that the hacker had avoided jail, as told to the Daily Dot.

“I’ve lost complete faith in the justice system, and that includes the FBI,” Blair Strater said. “He’s harmed American targets and the FBI should have stepped in by now. The reality is, Julius Kivimaki will never be made to pay for his crimes.”

In April, zeekill was also involved in an online harassment campaign against a 20-year-old. After an online hoax said that the victim’s telephone number was the hotline for a Tesla car competition, thousands of people ending up calling his home.

He was also found guilty of tampering with servers at MIT and Harvard University, as well as money laundering by the Espoo District Court.

According to Finnish newspaper Kaleva, Kivimaki had been carrying out illegal hacks and computer crimes since he was 15 years old.

The identities of Lizard Squad’s members were covered in mystery until security analyst Brian Krebs mentioned it on a blog post naming some of the suspects, including zeekill, earlier this year.

Previously, Lizard Squad has been held responsible for high-profile attacks on Facebook, Amazon, Tinder, and the Malaysia Airlines website. The group also claimed responsibility for knocking the whole of North Korea offline in 2013 for for a 24-hour period.

The purpose of targeting games networks and major companies has never been stated clearly in detail, although some attacks have referred Islamic State (Isis).

During the attack on Malaysia Airlines, a holding page was put on the company’s homepage directing the visitors to Twitter accounts connected with IS.

Questions have been raised by the security experts regarding the link between Lizard Squad and IS, stating that it is most probably a marketing gimmick to attract more media exposure for the group’s LizardStresser hacking tool.

The Lizard Squad Twitter account triumphantly bragged about the sentence, which surprised many for its leniency.

One tweet read: “Zeekill got a suspended sentence for 2 years. 0 time spent in prison.”

Another said: “Basically he’ll be monitored for 2 years by the local police. Gotta love Finland :).”

A final message read: “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.”

Kavita Iyer
Kavita Iyerhttps://www.techworm.net
An individual, optimist, homemaker, foodie, a die hard cricket fan and most importantly one who believes in Being Human!!!

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