UPDATED 11:22 EST / JULY 08 2015

NEWS

Teen responsible for Xbox Live and PSN holiday outages convicted of 50,700 counts of computer crime

The 2014 holiday season was fraught with network outages for Xbox Live and PlayStation Network, and now the Finnish teen who was allegedly responsible for the Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks that brought them down has been convicted of 50,700 counts of computer crime.

The charges against 17-year-old Julius “zeekill” Kivimaki include fraud, data breaches and harassment, among others.

Kivimaki was outed as a member of the hacker group Lizard Squad late last year by journalist Brian Krebs, and the teen appeared in an interview with British television show Sky News in December under the alias “Ryan.” During the interview, he discussed how many people took part in the holiday cyber attacks, as well as the group’s motives behind them.

“There’s the core members, which is about three or four people who actually perpetrated the attacks,” Kivimaki said. “And then there’s various other people involved doing various other things, but this attack…it was basically done by three people.”

“Why we did it?” He continued. “Mostly to advertise ourselves. Also, one of the big aspects here was raising awareness regarding the low state of computer security at these companies because these companies make tens of millions every month just from their subscriber fees, and that doesn’t even include purchases made by their customers. They should have more than enough funding to be able to protect against these attacks.”

When asked how he felt about the victims of the DDoS attacks, Kivimaki replied that he mostly saw Microsoft and Sony Corp as the primary victims because they were “losing money” over it.

Regarding the players themselves, Kivimaki said, “I’d be rather worried if those people didn’t have anything better to do than play games on their console on Christmas Eve and Christmas day. I mean, I can’t really say that I feel bad. I might have forced a couple of kids to spend their time with their families instead of playing games.”

While many of the gamers affected by the attacks are calling for Kivimaki’s blood, the teen received only a two-year suspended sentence and the stipulation that his online activities must be monitored. In other words, if he does it again, he might actually get in trouble for it.

Screenshot via Sky News | YouTube

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