Ctrl + Alt + chaos How teenage hackers hijack the internet

For all the deserved attention paid to professional adult hacking groups sponsored by malicious states who wreak havoc on all manner of cyber targets, we should not overlook the intrusive, damaging hacks conducted by random, isolated young men. One such hacker, as sociopathic and cruel as he was skilled, is Aleksanteri Kivimäki, aka Zeekill, RyanC, and Julius, who hacked and held for ransom the medical records of 33,000 psychiatric patients at Vastaamo, the largest mental hospital in Finland. Tidy anchors his study of teenage hackers with varying skill levels, known as Noob Persistent Threats (NPTs) by cybersecurity experts, with the many schemes of Kivimaki and such groups as UG Nazi, LulzSec, Hack the Planet, and Lizard Squad. He also examines the role of bitcoin as the filthy lucre of cybercrime and the efforts of various law enforcement entities to stem the tide of remote, random, and often transnational cyberattacks. The result is an informative and terrifying examination of the young prodigies whose invisible hands can reach into your digital life and turn it upside down.

A report from cyberspace on young black-hat hackers and their electronic mayhem. He called himself "the Untouchable Hacker God" or "Zeekill," and although Aleksanteri Julius Tomminpoika Kivimäki looked like a baby-faced Finnish teenager, he'd been a cybercriminal for years--and worse, got away with his crimes, taunting his victims and the police online. Things began to turn against him, writes British tech journalist Tidy, when he hacked into a psychotherapy clinic and demanded payment of 40 bitcoins to keep him from releasing therapy session notes and other sensitive materials. This was a bridge too far for many allied hackers, one of whom protested, "I'm not fucking interested in anyone's problems." Yet it's a typical case, as Tidy chronicles: Everywhere in cyberspace such privileged information is stolen, traded, and put to criminal use--and people have died as a result. White- and black-hat hackers share common origin stories, the author writes, stumbling into this sort of data through password cracking, social engineering, or other exploits; the difference is that young people like Kivimäki realize that there's money to be made from others' binary misfortune. "Arguably, Twitter gave birth to a new generation of fame-hungry hackers," Tidy writes, for it was there that black-hat self-promotion flourished, corresponding to "a shift in the culture of the teen hacking world--a deliberately cruel act designed to harm thousands of randomly targeted people." One such cruel act, carried out by Kivimäki and others, was to send SWAT teams to his targets' homes or, somewhat more benignly, to send over a carload of pizzas on their charge cards. Those cybercrimes grew in scale and scope as Kivimäki organized what he called the Lizard Squad--and he's now in prison for his troubles, courtesy of a game of cat-and-mouse that Tidy fluently recounts. If you're wondering where the next DOS attack is going to come from, think Russia--or maybe the kid next door. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.