Teen convicted of more than 50,000 computer hacks
A teenager involved in series of high profile cyber-attacks has been convicted for his crimes in Finland.
According to BBC, Julius Kivimaki, 17, was found guilty of 50,700 “instances of aggravated computer break-ins”.
Kivimaki’s attacks affected Harvard University and MIT among others, involved hijacking emails, blocking traffic to websites and theft of credit card details, court documents stated.
Kivimaki was accused of a hacking spree of more than 50,000 computer servers dating back to 2012 by exploiting vulnerabilities in a software program they ran called ColdFusion
By doing so, he was able to install “backdoors” into tens of thousands of the computers, which allowed him to retrieve information stored on them.
Through this backdoors he retrieved information stored on them that the company that provided MIT’s email infrastructure Educause said it incurred more than $213,000 in losses.
Kivimaki is reported to have accumulated $7270.06 worth of property through his escapades.