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This way they caught him is glossed over, But it was a mistake that the hacker made himself that led police to a treasure trove of information found on a serve

This way they caught him is glossed over, But it was a mistake that the hacker made himself that led police to a treasure trove of information found on a server that Kivimäki owned. Unprecedented digital forensics and cryptocurrency tracking also helped secure the conviction. What mistake did he make? Was incriminating evidence found on that server? Is there any direct evidence Kivimäki did it? The use of "unprecedented" is worrying, and extremely vague.

JohnMakin 3y ago
The previous sentence seems to be saying that the mistake was he dumped all of the therapy notes to the dark web anyway - likely linking him to some user profile or IP/crypto address in there that he was already known to assume. No need to jump to nefarious conclusions here. This guy seems arrogant and was already well known to law enforcement it appears. edit: saw the sibling comment explaining what happened. even dumber than I had imagined.
teetertater 3y ago
While publishing the data, he also published part of his home folder (containing his personal files). Although he cancelled the torrent before anyone could download the full version, the partial torrent could still have data extracted https://krebsonsecurity.com/2023/11/alleged-extortioner-of-psychotherapy-patients-faces-trial/ https://krebsonsecurity.com/2023/11/alleged-extortioner-of-p...
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  It might be technically unprecedented, but it doesn't sound particularly complicated.
  - mock-possum 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - romwell 3y ago
      >Typical self-aggrandizing copaganda. They got a guy who was personally blackmailing thousand of people in therapy, threatening to leak their therapist notes. I'll let the cops have all the aggrandizing they want for this one. Also, way too many solutions are obvious in retrospect. Many problems in life are NP-ish.
      - Teever 3y ago
        That's not how this works. Successfully doing your job isn't a free pass on not speaking to the media about your job in an unprofessional manner.
        emchammer 3y ago
        There was a TV show I watched 30 years ago already, NYPD Blue. When a criminal clearly abused children, Detective Andy Sipowicz, "a drunken, angry, racist goon with a heart of gold", would smack the perp around a bit, while his partners looked the other way. Somebody committed suicide because of this hack and extortion. That is a tragedy. How the tens of thousands of persons who were attempted to be extorted felt, how can you even measure that? Don't you think that there is a bit of grey area in a case like this?
        romwell 3y ago
        >Successfully doing your job isn't a free pass on not speaking to the media about your job in an unprofessional manner. Oh how dare these cops do something important, useful, and not at all straightforward for once and then feel good about it. How very unprofessional of them. >That's not how this works That is how it works in reality. You may not like it, but that's just how it works.
        Teever 3y ago
        Not everywhere. It's important to remember that there are places where police conduct themselves much more professionally. It's important to remember that because we must not normalize deviance.
Hamuko 3y ago
He made a crontab task to create a vastaamo.tar file from all of the files that had been randomly published so far. The mistake was that the command for creating the tarball was the wrong command and only worked accidentally in his tests because he was running the command from a specific directory. tar cvf /var/www/html/vastaamo/vastaamo.tar . -C /var/www/html/vastaamo --exclude vastaamo.tar Once he added the command to crontab, the command was executed from the root user's home directory and it created a 7.5 GB tarball before running out of space on the server two minutes later. The server didn't crash but started malfunctioning, as for example no logs could be written on disk. The police found that the maximum time that anyone was able to download the tarball was for 1 hour and 41 minutes before the TOR service had stopped responding. The admin of the server logged back about 10 hours after the tarball was created and tried to figure out how many downloads of the tarball had been made, but because the server had no space left, there was really no way to get a realistic image of the situation.

JohnMakin 3y ago

The previous sentence seems to be saying that the mistake was he dumped all of the therapy notes to the dark web anyway - likely linking him to some user profile or IP/crypto address in there that he was already known to assume. No need to jump to nefarious conclusions here. This guy seems arrogant and was already well known to law enforcement it appears. edit: saw the sibling comment explaining what happened. even dumber than I had imagined.

teetertater 3y ago

While publishing the data, he also published part of his home folder (containing his personal files). Although he cancelled the torrent before anyone could download the full version, the partial torrent could still have data extracted https://krebsonsecurity.com/2023/11/alleged-extortioner-of-psychotherapy-patients-faces-trial/ https://krebsonsecurity.com/2023/11/alleged-extortioner-of-p...

robertlagrant 3y ago
It might be technically unprecedented, but it doesn't sound particularly complicated.
- mock-possum 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - romwell 3y ago
    >Typical self-aggrandizing copaganda. They got a guy who was personally blackmailing thousand of people in therapy, threatening to leak their therapist notes. I'll let the cops have all the aggrandizing they want for this one. Also, way too many solutions are obvious in retrospect. Many problems in life are NP-ish.
    - Teever 3y ago
      That's not how this works. Successfully doing your job isn't a free pass on not speaking to the media about your job in an unprofessional manner.
      - emchammer 3y ago
        There was a TV show I watched 30 years ago already, NYPD Blue. When a criminal clearly abused children, Detective Andy Sipowicz, "a drunken, angry, racist goon with a heart of gold", would smack the perp around a bit, while his partners looked the other way. Somebody committed suicide because of this hack and extortion. That is a tragedy. How the tens of thousands of persons who were attempted to be extorted felt, how can you even measure that? Don't you think that there is a bit of grey area in a case like this?
      - romwell 3y ago
        >Successfully doing your job isn't a free pass on not speaking to the media about your job in an unprofessional manner. Oh how dare these cops do something important, useful, and not at all straightforward for once and then feel good about it. How very unprofessional of them. >That's not how this works That is how it works in reality. You may not like it, but that's just how it works.
        Teever 3y ago
        Not everywhere. It's important to remember that there are places where police conduct themselves much more professionally. It's important to remember that because we must not normalize deviance.

Hamuko 3y ago

He made a crontab task to create a vastaamo.tar file from all of the files that had been randomly published so far. The mistake was that the command for creating the tarball was the wrong command and only worked accidentally in his tests because he was running the command from a specific directory. tar cvf /var/www/html/vastaamo/vastaamo.tar . -C /var/www/html/vastaamo --exclude vastaamo.tar Once he added the command to crontab, the command was executed from the root user's home directory and it created a 7.5 GB tarball before running out of space on the server two minutes later. The server didn't crash but started malfunctioning, as for example no logs could be written on disk. The police found that the maximum time that anyone was able to download the tarball was for 1 hour and 41 minutes before the TOR service had stopped responding. The admin of the server logged back about 10 hours after the tarball was created and tried to figure out how many downloads of the tarball had been made, but because the server had no space left, there was really no way to get a realistic image of the situation.