A man suspected of having hacked into tens of thousands of files of people followed in psychotherapy in Finland was arrested on Friday February 3 in France, near Paris, we learned from a French police source.
The man on the run was under a European arrest warrant issued by Finland since October 2022 for extortion, hacking of tens of thousands of patient files undergoing psychotherapy.
The Finnish police confirmed, in a press release, his arrest in France, announcing to take
“all the necessary measures to obtain his extradition to Finland”
as quickly as possible.
In October 2020, panic gripped Finland with the revelation of the hacking of the company Vastaamo, managing 25 centers of psychotherapy centers across the country, and with it the theft of the data of thousands of patients.
The hackers had threatened the company to make the data public if it did not pay a ransom.
Then, in the fall of 2020, they began to disseminate data from some 2,000 patients, including children.
Some patients had received ransom demands of up to 200 euros in bitcoins, failing which their exchanges with their therapist would be published.
Computer flaw
The investigations had established that the company had encountered a computer flaw in 2019, leading investigators to believe that the hack dated from that time.
It was completely by chance, unrelated to his arrest warrant, that the man, suspected of having participated in this vast computer hacking, was arrested in Courbevoie, in the western suburbs of Paris, according to a French police source.
The police were alerted Friday morning by two women fearing that the boyfriend of an acquaintance of theirs had attacked her violently.
The officers then went to the couple's home to check that everything was okay.
It was then that they arrested the suspect, discovering that he was registered under three identities in the file of wanted persons,
Warned, the Finnish authorities have asked their French counterparts to
"freeze"
access to the apartment until they arrive on site to search the premises, a police source told AFP.