No Prison Sentence For Hacker Linked to Xmas PSN/XBL Takedown

A seventeen year-old with ties to black hat hacking group Lizard Squad has been convicted of more than 50,000 charges related to cyber crimes in a court in Espoo, Finland.

Local media reports claim that Julius “Zeekill” Kivimaki has been sentenced for a whole range of offences, such as data breaches, online harassment, fraud, and money laundering. He will serve a two-year suspended sentence and, according to the Finnish newspaper Kaleva, has been "ordered to fight against cyber crime." He has not been given a prison sentence.

Kivimaki has previously represented himself has a member of Lizard Squad, an online group of hackers who claim responsibility for a number of high-profile network disruptions and website takedowns.

One of Lizard Squad's most notorious attacks was the disruptions to Xbox Live and PlayStation Network, which were both knocked offline for several days between Christmas Day and New Year's.

A massive distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attack ground both those networks to a halt, resulting in engineers at both Sony and Microsoft working during the holidays to restore the service.

During the downtime, Sky News aired an interview with Kivimaki, and he suggested he had no regrets over the attack.

"I can't really say I feel bad. I might have forced some kids to spend more time with their families instead of playing games."

Through its Twitter account, a representative for Lizard Squad appeared to mock those who hoped Kivimaki would receive a harsher sentence.