I find it strange to report on a hacker releasing personal information, while building the narrative of the story with all of the personal details like "she’d had three children by the time she was 25, including twins who had been born extremely prematurely in the 1980s, weighing only a few hundred grams each", "crumbling marriage", and suicidal ideations.
I thought the whole point is that they were upset that their personal life was being broadcasted to the internet.
Knowing the timeline of events and the nicknames attributed to him (ryanlol included), some interesting posts can be found. For example, in the period between the CEO starting communication (September 2020) and the clinic's public admission (October 2020) [1], ryanlol replied to a top comment (Oct 3, 2020): "If you’re a hospital or, say, a school district, 'never pay' is simply an unconscionable attitude" [2]. Isn't it a hacker raging at the management that refuses to pay?
No more questions, Your Honor. Forgive my joyful attitude, but it was your choice to participate in this discussion. As you know from your years and thousands of posts, HN threads are often ephemeral and short-lived - and this one is no exception. Or maybe not... because of your active self-defense posting here, I assume for the first time since the arrest. Now dozens of fellow (HN) hackers are querying your nicknames on Google, Algolia, and whatever else they have at hand. I'm not sure they'll find someone who genuinely fights for a more secure world. Or prove me wrong if you wish.
> "Unfortunately, we have to ask you to pay to keep your personal information safe.”
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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:
> 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
> 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.
So yes, entering an empty password can cause all of your electronic devices in all your registered residences to be seized as evidence.
Note that the decompilation is on the complexity level of "strings $binary".
"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"
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:
"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.)"
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
> According to the ruling, the failure to adopt such measures did not, in the court’s view, constitute criminal negligence under Finnish law.
> Tapio’s conduct during and after the 2019 breach did not meet the threshold for criminal liability, the court concluded.
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
>Exactly, was it a burglary when your front door is open
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.
> Exactly, was it a burglary when your front door is open, lights on, spotlights on your wall safe, with the keys still inserted?
The thing isn't just the discovery of the "open door", though. Thousands of people were extorted in a pretty heinous way. Even if we say breaking in took little sophistication or effort, what was done with the data also matters.
Yes. Similarly, If I leave my car unlocked with the keys in the ignition, and someone takes it is still a crime. It might be unwise to do that (depending on where you are), but nonetheless it is still crime.
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.
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.
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.
Still reading the story but just hit that line and came here to snarkily post, “another MongoDB success story”. I should probably talk to my therapist about this desire to be seen as funny.
FYI: Finnish "social security numbers" (really, personal identification number) are not in any way secret. They are not used like U.S. social security numbers.
Finnish personal identification number is your date of birth, a sequence number, and a checksum.
Readit News
The article cites "Ryan" as one of his aliases, so the id ryanlol commenting in this thread could plausibly be Kivimäki.
Deleted Comment
I thought the whole point is that they were upset that their personal life was being broadcasted to the internet.
Wait for the other person to do so willingly seems kinda good advice in many areas.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pyCcvPfT_jU
Deleted Comment
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vastaamo_data_breach#Backgroun...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24672687
Nope
Dead Comment
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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
> 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.
So yes, entering an empty password can cause all of your electronic devices in all your registered residences to be seized as evidence.
Note that the decompilation is on the complexity level of "strings $binary".
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.
"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.)"
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
> According to the ruling, the failure to adopt such measures did not, in the court’s view, constitute criminal negligence under Finnish law.
> Tapio’s conduct during and after the 2019 breach did not meet the threshold for criminal liability, the court concluded.
[1] https://www.helsinkitimes.fi/finland/finland-news/domestic/2...
So they're saying this is not the case?
The CEO should be in prison.
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.
Yes.
> Exactly, was it a burglary when your front door is open, lights on, spotlights on your wall safe, with the keys still inserted?
The thing isn't just the discovery of the "open door", though. Thousands of people were extorted in a pretty heinous way. Even if we say breaking in took little sophistication or effort, what was done with the data also matters.
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.
Finnish personal identification number is your date of birth, a sequence number, and a checksum.