Cyber-bastard jailed for stealing psychotherapy files, blackmailing patients A cyber-thief who snatched tens of thousands of patients' sensitive records from a psychotherapy clinic before blackmailing them and then leaking their files online has been caged for six years and three months. The district court of Länsi-Uusimaa, Finland, sentenced Aleksanteri Kivimäki, 26, on Tuesday for crimes against the …
“Kivimäki, known online as Zeekill, broke into Psychotherapy Center Vastaamo Oy's IT system and downloaded the patient database.”
a. What was this stuff even doing on a computer?
b. Why were these patent records accessible over the Internet?
And there it is . . . I wondered when the first bit of victim blaming would arrive. It may come as a shock to you, but many medical offices, hospitals, etc. have entered the digital age and store their records, including patient information electronically, rather than, for example, on giant sheets of vellum or stone tablets. As to why the records were available over the Internet, one imagines that the Psychotherapy Center needs to share records with other medical organizations, and the Internet was, after all, created to enable data sharing between organizations.
But I see your point: we should all consider whether Kivimäki is the real victim here. After all, he had literally no choice but to break into the Center's IT systems, download the patient data, and then use it to extort payment from the clinic's patients.
And there it is . . . I wondered when the first bit of victim blaming would arrive.
The patients were the victims, and nobody's blaming them. In many case victims are at least partially to blame for what happened to them, that's not the case here.
Regarding b) the (now ex-) CEO of the firm was charged with data protection offences. The police also investigated two of the IT staff there, but decided not to prosecute.
As far as a) though, what fucking year do you think it is? Were you expecting that information to be on wax tablets or something?
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"I once briefly attended a session with a therapist."
... and apparently you believe this makes you some sort of authority on therapists generally and how all of them work. I also note that you don't say when you attended this therapy session. I briefly attended a meeting with a lawyer, and his desk was piled with case files, but that was also 25 years ago. I would assume that most lawyers these days would have much less paper clutter since most of their case files would now be digitized.
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There's some further background to this on the BBC -
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