In 2014, a hacking group known as Lizard Squad claimed credit for bringing down PlayStation Network and Xbox Live on Christmas. Over a decade later, one of Lizard Squad’s hackers, Julius Kivimaki, is the subject of Max’s upcoming four-part documentary series, Most Wanted: Teen Hacker. Kivimaki himself is one of the interview subjects in the first trailer below, although he seems less than remorseful about the crimes for which he is accused.
Lizard Squad was a black hat hacking group who were hacked themselves when they sold a hacking tool to other users. Two of the collective’s members were arrested in 2016 for the Christmas XBL and PSN attacks. However, the focus on this series is largely on Kivimaki–who has renamed himself Aleksanteri Kivimaki–for his alleged cyber criminal activities since he was 15 years old and living in Finland.
The trailer touches upon some of the crimes that Kivimaki is said to have committed, including hacking Elon Musk, SWAT-ing the home of an FBI agent’s family, and making a bomb threat to a plane that had Sony Online Entertainment President John Smedley as a passenger. The Air Force forced that flight to make an emergency landing because of the threat.
Because Kivimaki was a teenager when he was convicted of over 50,000 cyber crimes, he initially escaped serving time in prison. That changed in 2024, when he was convicted of leaking Finish therapy records and sentenced to six years in prison.
Max will premiere the first episode of Most Wanted: Teen Hacker in September. The series will feature interviews with Kivimaki, his victims, other “internationally known hackers,” a former FBI agent who took part in the investigation, and cybersecurity experts.
