Extortion of therapy patients in Finland shakes culture of privacy

Katleena Kortesuo wasn’t completely unprepared when the extortionist known as “RANSOM_MAN” got in touch with her last October.

Two days earlier, it had been reported that hackers had stolen confidential therapy records from Vastaamo, a private psychotherapy center based in Helsinki where Ms. Kortesuo was a patient. RANSOM_MAN – perhaps the original hacker, perhaps not – had been sending emails to patients threatening to make their stolen information public if they didn’t pay the sum demanded, usually €200 ($238).

“They knew my name, my email, and my personal identification number [the Finnish equivalent of the U.S. Social Security number],” says Ms. Kortesuo. “And they knew that I hadshe says, it was hard to process the affair – especially after the hacker backed up his threat by leaking some of the stolen data relating to the victims on the dark net. As of February, some 25,000 criminal reports had been filed in connection with the hack.