26-year-old Julius Kivimäki was sentenced to six years and three months for hacking thousands of sensitive patient records and seeking a ransom from some patients over confidential data.
The Finnish hacker targeted Vastaamo, the biggest and leading provider of psychotherapy services in Finland.
He blackmailed about 33,000 people after stealing their records, with at least one suicide linked to the case.
The incident in 2020 caused public outrage, with as many as 24,000 people filing criminal complaints with the police, and the well-known psychotherapy company forced to shut down.
A local district court also found the Finnish hacker guilty of aggravated data breach, in which he committed nearly 21,000 aggravated blackmail attempts and more than 9,200 aggravated disseminations of information infringing private life, among other things.
Kivimäki, who was living under a false identity in France, was arrested by the French police in February 2023 and deported to Finland.
His trial started in October last year and ended in April.
It was considered the largest crime in Finland’s history due to the number of victims involved.
Kivimäki was a celebrity in the hacking world who was a former member of the international hacking group Lizard Squad.
Some of his infamous exploits involved hacking Tesla and Elon Musk’s Twitter accounts, as well as getting convicted on more than 50,000 counts of computer crimes when he was still a teenager.
