Image: Petteri Sopanen / Yle Yle News
Ten years after Elon Musk’s Twitter account was giving out free Teslas and the PlayStation Network was shut down, the then-teenage hacker behind it all is finally having his story told. The trailer for the new Max docuseries, Most Wanted Teen Hacker, previews how Finnish hacker Julius Kivimäki’s cyber exploits will be laid out with Mr. Robot-esque theatrics.
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It only takes a 55-second teaser to grasp how much of a movie-level villain Kivimäki was in real life. Beyond the PSN and Musk hacks, he “triggered a U.S. Air Force alert by forcing a passenger jet to make an emergency landing,” according to the trailer. Seconds after that revelation, an FBI agent attests that Kivimäki revealed he had law enforcement sent to the families of FBI agents by making fake emergency phone calls, an act known as “swatting,” because “he thought it was fun, and he enjoyed hurting or seeing people suffer.” The teaser even features an unidentified man, presumably a victim of Kivimäki’s hacks, who vows to kill him the second the two are in the same location.
The documentary will not only have victims of his hacks, fellow hackers, SWAT team members, and FBI agents, but also the incarcerated Kivimäki himself. The first of four episodes will be released in September, but brushing up on the news of Kivimäki’s hacking spree will give you a better understanding of the criminal at the center of the doc more than any teaser could. In 2024, Kivimäki was sentenced to six years and three months in prison for hacking Finnish private psychotherapy service provider Vastaamo in 2020 and blackmailing thousands of patients with the threat of revealing their deepest, darkest secrets. He also committed a mind-boggling 50,700 cyber break-ins from 2012 to 2013, when he was 15 and 16 years old, respectively.
Kivimäki looks devoid of all emotion or sense of accountability in the teaser, calling the charges against him “bullshit.” We’ll delve deeper into the emotionless steel trap that is his mind later this fall when we see how movie-quality villainry can have real-world consequences.