17-Year-Old Lizard Squad Hacker Convicted of 50,700 Charges After Attacking PlayStation Network

A 17-year-old hacker believed to be affiliated with the Lizard Squad, the hacking group who claimed responsibility for knocking Sony’s PlayStation Network and Microsoft’s Xbox Live offline last Christmas has been convicted on 50,700 counts of cybercriminal activities, however will serve no time behind bars.

The infamous hacker gang known as Lizard Squad launched a massive Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Attack against the worlds largest gaming engines over Christmas break, knocking both PlayStation and Xbox servers offline over the holiday weekend.

Following the fame hackers gained after their DDoS attacks the group began to sell a DDoS/stress tester tool called Lizard Stresser. The tool ran off of hacked home routers allowing the tool to work efficiently and effectively.

17-Year-Old Juluis Kivimaki, known under his online alias zeekill was slapped with a two-year sentence but will serve zero prison time and was “ordered to fight against cybercrime,” according to one Finnish newspaper, Kaleva.

Kivimaki, who rand under his online alias, Ryan or zeekill, spoke an a TV interview with the U.K. television network Sky News, where he publicly claimed that he is in fact a member of Lizard Squad and that their ongoing cyber attacks on gaming corporations were performed to raise awareness of Microsoft and Sony’s poor security measures.

Attacks were ongoing for several days, leaving gaming networks offline for a better part of their day while security engineers struggled to mitigate the attack. Lizard Squad ceased attacked after Megaupload founder, Kim Dotcom, offered the group 3,000 Mega vouchers to stop the attacks, amounting to a $300,000 bribe. After Dotcom offered hackers the hefty bribe the group immediately stopped attacked and made a deal with Dotcom to stop attacking servers once and for all.

Kivimaki’s 50,700 hacking charges aren’t all related to the massive DDoS attacks. Speaking with Daily Dot, Kivimaki repeatedly harassed 20-year-old Blair Strater, who expressed he was “absolutely disgusted by the ruling” after mentioning the jail sentence was to light.

According to Strater, Kivimaki called in several false threats to American law enforcement, spawning SWAT teams to arrive at Strater’s door under the assumption that he was a criminal. The term is called Swatting, it is when an individual files a false police report at a victim’s address, causing law enforcement to arrive at your doorstep armed and ready.

Kivimaki allegedly harassed Strater and his family for three years where he consistently stole their identities with intent to ruin their finances and personal lives.

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

Kivimaki’s hacking charges include data breaches, digital harassment, payment fraud among other fraudulent charges and stealing company secrets.