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Imagine Committing 50,000 Cybercrimes. Then Turning 17.
HBO Max featured a new four-part documentary series called Most Wanted: Teen Hacker. And it’s worth your time.
Anthony Collette
February 17, 2026 • Estimated Reading Time: 7 minutes
Happy Tuesday! As a follow-up to one of our recent posts: HBO Max featured a new four-part documentary series about cybercrime that follows the exploits of Julius Kivimäki, a prolific Finnish hacker. He was convicted of leaking tens of thousands of patient records from a nation-wide psychotherapy practice while attempting to extort the clinic and its patients. |  |
The documentary, Most Wanted: Teen Hacker, dives into Kivimäki’s lengthy and increasingly destructive hacking career. By age 17, a Finnish court found him guilty of more than 50,000 cybercrimes, including data breaches, payment fraud, and operating a global network of hacked computers. Over time he focused more on cyber attacks designed to result in real-world physical impacts on their targets. In one case, he randomly picked someone and repeatedly harassed them, for no particular reason.
Our goal in sharing this story isn’t to lionize or make heroes out of criminal hackers.
But the World has changed, and it’s up to us to better understand how it’s different now, and what we can do about it.
— Anthony Collette
Founder, Loistava Information Security
What’s A Hacker?
Have you ever been curious about how something is put together? Have you ever taken something apart, tried to see how the pieces interact, then tried to put it back together . . . somehow even better?
In the before times, we called this tinkering. And if your curiosity led you to investigate, pull things apart, put them back together differently, possibly inventing something new in the process, we’d call you a tinkerer. This archetype of the curious inventor appeared in popular culture in multiple Disney films, and took a central theme in the beloved 1968 classic “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” starring Dick Van Dyke. In the U.S. we have a long history of popular culture celebrating the tinkerer as quirky, fun and curious, but also harmless and well-meaning.
Fast forward a few decades into our digital Internet era and now we call this curiosity hacking. The general dynamic is the same . . . an interest in how things and systems are built, how the pieces interact, how to use them in unexpected or novel ways. You can think of hacking as curiosity in action.
But when that healthy interest takes a negative, malignant turn, it becomes criminal hacking.
The whole point is to hurt people, usually to extort money or simply to inflict pain.
An Extreme Example
One of the most extreme examples of this change in the digital world is the story of a Finnish hacker with a long history of committing crimes online. BBC produced a stunning six-episode documentary podcast exploring the locations, victims and international effort to end the hacking.
If you’d rather watch than listen: HBO Max featured a new four-part documentary series called Most Wanted: Teen Hacker. The action really heats up in the 3rd and 4th episodes, as investigators bounce between cities on the hunt for the hacker: from Helsinki, to Dubai, Paris, London, Turku and Seattle.
If you’d rather read than watch: Among the many experts interviewed for the HBO Max documentary, well-known and highly respected U.S. cyber investigator Brian Krebs wrote a detailed post exploring the background and progression of this hacking spree over 10+ years.
Also interviewed extensively, Joe Tidy is the BBC’s first dedicated cybersecurity reporter. He recently published Ctrl + Alt + Chaos: How Teenage Hackers Hijack the Internet, described as “an immersive, pulse-pounding exposé on the global rise of teenage hackers, offering an insider's portrait of the dark net and the key players who are disrupting corporations, government institutions and our everyday lives.”
UPDATE: The hacker, Julius Kivimäki, has been released from jail pending his appeal. And an American citizen living in Estonia has been charged by Finnish prosecutors of aiding and abetting the extortion of psychotherapy patients. For a concise summary of recent developments: https://www.bitdefender.com/en-us/blog/hotforsecurity/vastaamo-psychotherapy-hack-us-citizen-charged-in-latest-twist-of-notorious-data-breach
Well, this is alarming and I don’t want to get hacked by a 17-year-old (or anyone else). What’s the best cybersecurity advice I can follow today?
It’s less complicated than you might think, since mastering The Basics can go a long way toward keeping you safe online. They are:
✔ Know The Basics — Understand how the world has changed, and what you can do about it.
✔ Modern Passwords — Create and use strong, unique, Modern Passwords for each online account.
✔ Password Manager — Use a high-quality Password Manager to create, remember and type the passwords for your online accounts.
✔ Diceware Passphrase — Craft and use a Diceware Passphrase to lock down your Password Manager.
✔ Multi-factor Authentication (MFA) — Implement MFA for each online account that offers it.
There are no guarantees in life. But fortunately, these 5 foundational building blocks are proven to work extremely well. You can massively stack the deck in your favor by intelligently adding each one to your online experience.
This advice comes straight from The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), so you know it’s reliable.
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Looking forward to connecting again next week.
— Anthony Collette
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