Genius teen given two years sentence for hacking

A 17-year-old Finnish teenager has been given a two-year suspended sentence after being found guilty of 50,700 computer hackings over a span of three years, including the hacking of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) powerhouse.

According to the BBC, Julius Kivimaki was found guilty of hijacking emails, blocking traffic to websites and identity theft by accessing credit card details under the pseudonym Zeekill.

Kivimaki was accused of a hacking spree dating back to 2012 when he hacked into thousands of computer servers and exploited their vulnerabilities in a software program he ran called ColdFusion.

Through the software, he managed to create a botnet which he used to carry out denial of service (DoS) attacks on other systems by bombarding affected computers with internet traffic causing them to become overwhelmed and crash.

Through this backdoors he retrieved information stored on them that the company that provided MIT’s email infrastructure Educause said it incurred more than Sh21 million in losses.

Kivimaki is reported to have accumulated Sh729,166 worth of property through his escapades.