"the patient records database was accessible via the internet; there was no firewall and, perhaps most egregiously, it was secured with a blank password, so anyone could just press enter and open it"<p>There _should_ be a bunch of people in jail for that. Including, but not limited to the CEO. It should also include all the people on the org chart between whoever set that database up and the CEO.
Indeed, the CEO was held criminally liable, but the charges were dropped in a higher court just recently. From the article:<p>"In April 2023, Tapio was found guilty of criminal negligence in his handling of patient data. His conviction was overturned on appeal in December 2025. (He declined my requests to interview him.)"<p>More specifically, he was charged of a data protection crime (i.e., note that in Finland these GDPR-like things are also in the criminal law). However, based on local news, I suppose there was not enough evidence that it was specifically a responsibility of a CEO or that CEO-level gross negligence occurred.
According to this report [1] the appeal was about specific requirements like encryption, and he claimed he had delegated it. So it is clear that it is hard to actually hold people responsible.<p>> The appellate court rejected the prosecution's argument and dismissed all charges. In its unanimous decision, the court stated that neither the GDPR nor the applicable Finnish healthcare legislation required encryption or pseudonymisation of patient data at the time in question.<p>> Prosecutors alleged that Tapio knew about the March 2019 breach and failed to act. They claimed he neglected legal obligations to report and document the incident and did not take sufficient steps to protect the database. Tapio denied the claims, saying he was unaware of the breach until autumn 2020 and had delegated technical oversight to external IT professionals.<p>> The court found there was no clear legal requirement at the time obliging Tapio, as CEO, to take the specific security measures cited by the prosecution. These included firewall management, password policies, access controls, VPN implementation, and security updates.<p>> According to the ruling, the failure to adopt such measures did not, in the court’s view, constitute criminal negligence under Finnish law.<p>> Tapio’s conduct during and after the 2019 breach did not meet the threshold for criminal liability, the court concluded.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.helsinkitimes.fi/finland/finland-news/domestic/28328-court-clears-former-vastaamo-ceo-ville-tapio-of-data-protection-charges.html?tmpl=component&layout=default" rel="nofollow">https://www.helsinkitimes.fi/finland/finland-news/domestic/2...</a>
Funny whenever people complain about the GDPR here they're thinking they would be slapped with a €20Mi fine and that EU team 6 is going to parachute in their office and arrest everyone<p>So they're saying this is not the case?
Well, not for public bodies at least: “ Administrative fines cannot be imposed on public organisations, such as the government or state-owned companies, municipalities and parishes” [1]<p>But luckily this sort of thing never happens in the public sector. Except for when it does: <a href="https://yle.fi/a/74-20094950" rel="nofollow">https://yle.fi/a/74-20094950</a><p>[1] <a href="https://tietosuoja.fi/en/corrective-powers" rel="nofollow">https://tietosuoja.fi/en/corrective-powers</a>
> So they're saying this is not the case?<p>Yes it was. The company was fined 20M EUR on standard GDPR-basis and went bankrupt (but unlikely due to the fine alone). Please re-read the above discussion.
Exactly, was it a burglary when your front door is open, lights on, spotlights on your wall safe, with the keys still inserted?<p>The CEO should be in prison.
Someone presented a hypothetical scenario: What if a hacker would write a virus, which breached a totally unprotected database after the hacker has passed away. It's clear that the therapy provider is at least partially responsible.
>Exactly, was it a burglary when your front door is open<p>Legally speaking, yes in every place I've ever lived if all those things are the case it's still a burglary, although the cops may call the victim an idiot.
In the UK, there is no crime "burglary".<p>"Breaking and entering" it's a criminal offence, and walking through an unlocked front door back door doesn't count. If you are on someone's land but didn't have to break in then that's trespass, which is just a civil offense.<p>Theft is a crime in any case (indeed even if you're not on their land e.g. snatching a phone off the street).
Technically, yes it is still burglary.<p>It's an odd position to take, that a crime was not committed or the offense isn't as bad if the difficulties of committing the crime have been removed or reduced.
> odd position [...] offense isn't as bad if the difficulties of committing the crime have been removed or reduced<p>Not really, intent is a part of the crime. If the barrier for crime is extremely small, the crime itself is less egregious.<p>Planning a robbery is not the same as picking up a wallet on the sidewalk. This is a feature, not a bug.
This. 1000x this.<p>Yes, it’s still wrong to take things but the guy should get like community service teaching white hat techniques or something. The CEO should be charged with gross negligence, fraud, and any HIPPA/Medical records laws he violated - per capita. Meaning he should face 1M+ counts of …
Now, how do we apply that to today’s current events?<p>Is it still a crime if the roadblocks to commit the crime are removed? Even applauded by some? What happens when the chief of police is telling you to go out and commit said crimes?<p>Law and order is dictated by the ruling party. What was a crime yesterday may not be a crime today.<p>So if all you did was turn a key and now you’re a burglar going to prison, when the CEO of the house spent months setting up the perfect crime scene, shouldn’t the CEO at least get an accomplice charge? Insurance fraud starts the same way…
It's a common attitude with people from low-trust societies. "I'm not a scammer - I'm clever. If you don't want us to scam your system why do you make it so easy?"
Yes it absolutely is still a burglary. Classic victim blaming.
Yup, I heard of an ERP full of microservices and many endpoints dont check authorization at all and the auth mechanism doesnt check valid user credentials. Seems like they are very common.
I have seen therapists in the past, but never over video calls, and the notes have been kept on paper. Sometimes in person is much better.<p>This rush to put everything online will destroy everyone's privacy even though privacy is the thing we all need.
This isn't a great solution, but it has helped me forgive myself, maybe it can be a trend in the future: You didn't pick your DNA, you didn't pick your environment. (Determinism in a nutshell)<p>The bad things that happened to you, and the bad thing you did, should be seen as somewhat outside our control.<p>I think of my worst google searches (nsfw stuff) and think: "Well, I'm just a chemical reaction."<p>But then again, I read the book A Billion Wicked Thoughts and found I'm pretty vanilla, we just don't talk about these things out loud.<p>Maybe my life is tame, but even when I hear from other people, everything seems pretty reasonable.<p>I know this is an 'after the fact' fix, but its a tool for our toolbox. We could look at people who criticize us as people who are ignorant of Determinism. (But we still need mechanisms to deter bad behavior)
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This is why you should not go to a therapist who uses electronic records. This will happen to you at some point.
There's a nice episode from darknetdiaries about it <a href="https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/159/" rel="nofollow">https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/159/</a>
Unfortunately that relies on Joe Tidy as the source.<p>I tend to refrain from being overly critical of journalists who write about me, but Joe Tidy is a special kind of idiot who wrote an entire book about me based mostly around interviews of people who aren't actually the people they claim to be.
> "Unfortunately, we have to ask you to pay to keep your personal information safe.”<p>I can't put my finger on why, but the faux "aw shucks, our hands are tied" makes me even more pissed off by the fact that they're leaking people's therapy notes. Just come out and say you're an amoral money seeker.
I'm a broken record about this by now, but stories like these keep reminding me how broken the law is for ethical hackers in Germany. If an ethical hacker found something like this in Germany, it would from my knowledge not be clear if entering an empty password counts as "circumventing or breaking a security barrier". "No password barrier" has recently been clarified in courts, but "Static Password" hasn't.<p>And once you break a security barrier, you're breaking the law. Even GDPR doesn't help you there - that just ensures more people are breaking different laws. And this can get all your devices seized, land you in jail, end your career, cause thousands of Euros of equipment loss, because the new laptop naturally got lost in the return process after 6 - 12 months.<p>And thus, many people with the skill to find such problems and report them silently to get them closed do ... nothing. Until bad people find these holes and what the article describes happens. And Europe has hacker groups who could turn our cybersecurity upside down in a good way. Very frustrating topic.
Hard-coded, publicly available credentials <i>are</i> criminal to circumvent in germany. See <a href="https://www.heise.de/en/news/Modern-Solution-Court-of-Appeal-confirms-guilt-of-security-researcher-10007206.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.heise.de/en/news/Modern-Solution-Court-of-Appeal...</a> which is now settled, since the appeal was rejected. <a href="https://www.heise.de/en/news/Federal-Constitutional-Court-rejects-appeal-in-Modern-Solution-case-10663687.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.heise.de/en/news/Federal-Constitutional-Court-re...</a><p>> At the end of the trial, however, this had little impact on the verdict. The presiding judge stated for the record that the mere fact that the [publicly available] software had set a password for the connection meant that viewing the raw data of the [publicly available] program and subsequently connecting to the [publicly available] Modern Solution database constituted a criminal offense under the hacker paragraph.<p>Yes, taking publicly available data verbatim (no ROT13, nothing) and talking to a publicly available server on the internet can in fact be a criminal offense.
Thank you for providing an example that is exactly showing how messed up this is:<p>> Der Vorsitzende Richter gab zu Protokoll, dass alleine die Tatsache, dass die Software ein Passwort für die Verbindung gesetzt habe, bedeute, dass ein Blick in die Rohdaten des Programms und eine anschließende Datenbankverbindung zu Modern Solution den Straftatbestand des Hackerparagrafen erfülle<p>> The Judge gave to protocol that just the fact that the software requires a password for the connection, implies that a look at the raw data of the program and a subsequent database connection is considered hacking.<p>So yes, entering an empty password can cause all of your electronic devices in all your registered residences to be seized as evidence.<p>Note that the decompilation is on the complexity level of "strings $binary".
Wasn't he the guy that used tar for the leaked folder of data, but the tar included his user folder which contained his legal name?
Do we really only catch the laziest hackers? The opsec is shocking.
<a href="https://archive.is/7uCnb" rel="nofollow">https://archive.is/7uCnb</a>
<a href="https://archive.is/7uCnb" rel="nofollow">https://archive.is/7uCnb</a>
> he had not only accidentally uploaded all of the therapy notes, but also his entire home folder<p>Lol. At least it's a good reminder about bad opsec.
He’s done less than seven years of time, shows no remorse and even denies doing it in the first place. You dropped the ball on this Finland, don’t be surprised when he does it again. What a disgusting human being.
I'd bet good money that this dude has some sort of antisocial personality disorder, and really can't be "cured", so to speak.<p>Something tells me he'll try to sneak out of Finland (which is easy due to Schengen), purchase a new passport, and leave Europe.<p>I guess a silver lining here is the possibility that he'll commit crimes in countries with far harsher penalties than Finland.<p>I've lived in Finland myself, and currently live in Norway. Lax punishments for the sake of rehabilitation is the standard, and I'm fine with that. But some people, like this one, simply can't be rehabilitated.
Well, we keep hearing that the Nordic Countries are the happiest on Earth. (Which I don't buy even if they do get some things right.)
Yeah they shouldn't be surprised if someone solves this outside the legal system
So, would it be better if I feigned remorse for a crime I didn't even commit in the first place?
I've said it before, but these types of malicious hackers should face draconian punishment. Decades behind bars.
"Jazz police are looking through my folders. Jazz police are talking to my niece. Jazz police have got their final orders. Jazzer, drop your axe, it's jazz police!"
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