Oswego Family Details Hacking Hell

In May of 2015, several messages were posted on a Yahoo message board claiming a school would be shot up. The threats proved to be fake, but there was something more sinister behind it.

The messages claimed to be from Amy Strater, an Oswego resident, but that turned out not to be the case. In fact, Strater, husband Paul and son Blair were just as much of a victim in an online war that had been going on for years.

In an article by Fusion, writer Kevin Roose details the online horror story the Strater family had to live through.

It began when the Strater’s 20-year-old son, Blair, got into a fight with a Finnish hacker named Julius Kivimaki, who uses the online handles “zeekill” and “ryan.” The fight reportedly focused on “whose server would host a new hacker ‘zine,’ or collection of data,” according to Fusion.

Since then, it’s been a long, winding road of harassment, police involvement, threats and suffering.

In November 2012, a local police detective received an email from a temporary email account with an address similar to Blair’s. The email contained a bomb threat. Blair was on court-ordered probation at the time, as the result of a 2010 incident in which he’d hacked and defaced his school’s website. (According to Blair, he pled guilty to one juvenile count of computer tampering.) When the bomb threat email arrived, Blair was arrested and held for three weeks in jail before officers determined it was a hoax.

The Strater family has received several unwanted deliveries, including many pizzas, and their cable was shut off. But those incidents were the lighter side of events.

On Oct. 24 2013, police officers went to the Strater home after receiving a call that Blair had taken PCP and killed his mom. Police eventually realized it was just another prank.

When Fusion went to interview Kivimaki, he denied most of the cyber attacks, including an instance where he allegedly hacked a website and gave out Blair’s phone number, saying that if anyone wanted a free Tesla they should call that number.

“I’ve been involved in very little of the stuff he’s attributing to me,” Kivimaki wrote to Fusion. “I didn’t do the Tesla hack, never ordered anything to him, for whatever strange reason I can’t seem to remember swatting him either.”

In fact, Kivimaki said most of the pain inflicted upon the Strater family was Blair’s own fault, claiming that he was not very liked in the hacker community.

Kivimaki was eventually convicted of 50,000 counts of computer crimes, had his computer confiscated and received a two-year suspended sentence.

But for the Strater family, they’re trying to recover from the digital disaster that was created for them.

To read the full article by Fusion, click here.