Pair of hammer-wielding, masked crooks steal thousands of dollars worth of Pokémon cards from 2 stores
Cops are on the hunt for a pair of hammer-wielding masked bandits who stole thousands of dollars worth of collectible Pokémon cards from two Detroit-area stores over a five-day crime spree earlier this month.
The card thieves hit both stores in the early morning before either was open and caused massive damage to one by smashing the glass displays showcasing the cards, according to cops and reports.
In the first heist, the duo — dressed in all black and wearing full face coverings — hit RIW Hobbies & Gaming in Livonia on May 16 around 5 a.m., Fox 2 Detroit reported.
4 Police are on the hunt for two masked, hammer-wielding bandits in the Detroit area stealing Pokémon cards.
FOX 2 DETROIT
Store owner Pam Willoughby came in to open the shop later that morning and discovered her glass cases shattered and her Pokémon cards missing.
She checked her security cameras and watched the footage in horror as the two Pokémon perps smashed her display cases with a hammer, grabbed the cards, and stuffed them in sacks before running off.
'When I actually watched them just standing in the building by themselves swinging a hammer, it was a little unnerving — it was an invasion,' Willoughby told WXYZ.
She told Fox 2 that the bandits cost her $12,000 between the damage to her store and the price of the cards.
She believes the sticky-fingered duo may have taken the stash to sell at the Motor City Comic Con, where hundreds of vendors gather to trade Pokémon and other similar cards — which began the very same day of her break-in.
4 Pam Willoughby, the owner of RIW Hobbies & Gaming, watched her security footage in horror as two bandits smashed her display case to steal Pokémon cards.
FOX 2 DETROIT
A few days later, on May 20, again around 5 a.m., a similarly dressed hammer-wielding suspect broke into Eternal Games in Warren, where he stole more Pokémon cards, security footage shows. That time, the bandit leapt over the display case, crammed the cards into a sack, and escaped, according to WXYZ.
'They didn't smash out the showcase but hopped the showcase, opened up the showcase and then crouched down and took, took, hopped over and left,' Eternal Games assistant manager Dakota Olszewski told Fox 2.
4 Owners of collectible card stores in the Detroit area are worried they might be the next victims of the Pokémon bandits.
FOX 2 DETROIT
Olszewski said they stole $3,500 worth of singles — rare cards that are nearly impossible to restock.
'I don't think we are going to find the cards specifically, which is a bummer because they're pretty cool,' she said.
This isn't the first time that Pokémon cards have been at the center of criminal activity and violent behavior.
4 The smashed display case where the Pokémon bandits struck in the Detroit area.
FOX 2 DETROIT
In January, cops were nearly called to a Costco in Los Angeles when bedlam broke out between customers jostling over the coveted cards. Wild footage captured an older customer wrapping a younger customer in a bear hug during the brawl.
The younger man smashed the attacker in the face with his elbow while a female shopper yelled at him.
'Get the f–k off of me bro,' one shopper said, according to a video posted on X by YouTuber DisguisedToast.
A few months later, a not-so-friendly Spider-Man was arrested after security camera footage caught him breaking into a store in northern Virginia. Joel Brown, 20, was accused of robbing a family-owned collectibles store wearing a Spider-Man suit to conceal his true identity and making off with rare, limited edition Pokémon cards.
With tariffs hurting the market, Pokémon and other trading cards are seeing a surge in demand as investors seek out alternatives beyond the traditional mix of financial standbys.
The trading card industry is valued at more than $15 billion as of 2024.
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EXCLUSIVE: Women Allegedly Filmed Nude By Guards While in Prison Speak Out
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Attorneys from Detroit-based Flood Law are representing the plaintiffs, claiming that guards' actions constitute a felony as a violation of a Michigan law (MCL 750.539j) in addition to violating other fundamental constitutional rights. A policy directive was issued by MDOC on March 24 of this year, saying, "Employees issued a body-worn camera (BWC) as part of their job duties shall adhere to the guidelines set forth in this policy directive." Michigan is currently the only state that has a policy to videotape strip searches. Litigators point to language stated within the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA), which outlines MDOC's "zero-tolerance standard toward all forms of sexual abuse and sexual harassment involving prisoners." A clause within PREA alludes directly to voyeurism, which states: "An invasion of privacy of a prisoner by an employee for reasons unrelated to official duties, such as peering at a prisoner who is using a toilet in their cell to perform bodily functions; requiring a prisoner to expose their buttocks, genitals, or breasts; or taking images of all or part of a prisoner's naked body or of a prisoner performing bodily functions." The PREA policy also includes the following language, underlined within: "The Department has zero tolerance for sexual abuse and sexual harassment of prisoners." Newsweek did not receive responses to multiple inquiries sent to Whitmer's office and the Michigan Department of Corrections. A spokesperson for Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel told Newsweek that the department's involvement would only be to provide legal representation for the State of Michigan defendants named on the lawsuit, deferring comment to those individuals. 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Combs-Holbrook told Newsweek that she's done basically every job behind bars she could, from cleaning toilets to mentoring to working in the law library. She had heard rumors about strip searches being recorded but then experienced it herself in January. "For me, it just escalated the already problematic procedure of strip searches in general," she said. "The strip searches here are extremely humiliating and demeaning and horrifying, and the fact that they started recording them just made it even worse. "I think that actually the day that they told us that the cameras were actually going to be in use, I had a visit ,and I had it canceled because just the thought of having to be strip-searched is already horrific enough-and then to be recorded just took it over the top." That was a sentiment shared by LaToya Joplin, who is serving a life sentence for first-degree murder. The 47-year-old has been in prison for 18 years, 17 of which have been spent as a chaplain. She's also been working as an observation aide for 12 years, helping individuals with suicidal ideations. "I felt degraded, I felt humiliated, and I felt embarrassed as a woman," Joplin told Newsweek of being recorded in the shower, the first such instance she's ever been recorded behind bars. The mental and emotional anguish have contributed towards a more defensive posture, she said, that includes not even wanting to go to work anymore because she's "scared of the unknown" and whether recordings of her and other women will reach the wrong hands. Recordings have made Paula Bennett, 35, wary of continuing to visit with family members-something she's taken advantage of to the fullest in her 17 years in prison. After hearing rumors around the facility of body cam recordings, she thought it was just hearsay. Then, one day prior to a scheduled visit, she was strip-searched by a female lieutenant who allegedly told Bennett that it was just a "passive recording" and that only certain people could access the footage. Bennett told Newsweek she began canceling visits due to not wanting to submit herself to the recorded searches. That included seeing her father, who has Alzheimer's and has visited her twice a week for the entire duration of her prison stint. "It was really hard to choose between not wanting to be recorded naked and seeing my father. ... I just came to the conclusion that I couldn't be giving up time that my dad needed," Bennett said. "So, I did go on a visit and was super upset as soon as I walked into the visiting room. I was crying to [my family] because I knew at the end what was going to happen. "And when I got to the end of the visit that day, the officer's body camera battery had died. So, I didn't get recorded. I remember feeling like I had just won the lottery." Bennett is serving life for first-degree murder after she aided and abetted her boyfriend, resulting in a mandatory life sentence. But she will be resentenced due to being a juvenile when the crime was committed. Another prisoner, 50, requested anonymity and will be referred to as Jane Doe. She's been imprisoned 31 years, serving life for first-degree murder; however, the Michigan Supreme Court has ruled that her sentence is unconstitutional. She will be going back for resentencing in Wayne County. Jane Doe initially asked guards if they could turn off their records, to which they declined due to policy. She wondered why inmates were even being recorded, who was going to observe the footage, and feared the footage being "hacked" and obtained by outside parties. The dental technician who makes dentures for inmates statewide has the highest clearance of any prison job, she said, and it requires walking through a metal detector before the searches take place. "I work four days a week, so we have to be strip-searched every day," she told Newsweek. "I would say [I've been recorded] about 75 to 90 times. You literally disassociate. That's the only way that I can be able to get through it because you end up breaking down in prison. One [search] is hard enough to take the abuse that we that we're subjected to." The experience for 21-year-old inmate Natalie Larson was a different type of traumatic: On March 6, she gave birth to a son in front of multiple guards who recorded the event. Larson has been in prison for about one year and is serving two to 15 years for creation/delivery of an analogue-controlled substance. She told Newsweek that she entered prison pregnant and understood it would be different than the births of her first two children. She just didn't realize that the entire delivery would be etched in footage handled by MDOC officers, one male and one female. "What was supposed to be one of the most sacred and happiest moments of my life was completely taken from me by a corrections officer and their body camera," Larson said. "I felt extremely humiliated and degraded. I was ashamed that I even had to experience that. ... It was just very inhumane to me. They had no decency or respect for the fact that I had just given birth to my child." The male officer was a bit further away from her, while the female officer "was literally within arm's length" and sitting near her mother. To add insult to injury, Larson said she received less than 48 hours with her new child. As someone who said she's experienced a lot of trauma in her life, she said this was arguably the worst incident to endure. Due to her delivery, which was one of three births in prison that were recorded, Larson said she doesn't really like to leave the housing unit anymore. She's also declined to look into higher-paying job opportunities due to the high frequency of strip searches. "I feel like they should take away the body cameras," she said. "There's cameras all over the prison that have audio, video. I don't really see the need for the body cameras. And it's not only like they're just recording strip searches; they're recording us in the bathroom, us in the shower. "We have very little privacy in this prison as it is, and for them to be recording us in a state of undress like that is just absurd to me." Of the women who spoke with Newsweek, the majority are victims of previous sexual violence. All expressed their concerns, one way or another, to different officials within the facility, all the way up to the warden. Some guards were receptive to their concerns and iterated it's just a requirement of their jobs, while others have been claimed to be more power-hungry and use the cameras to intimidate. "A lot of them were pretty cocky," Towle said. "They were like, 'Don't tell me about it, take it to the captain. Nothing I can do about it.' But I believe that everybody has a choice because there were some officers that turned to the side and the camera was not faced at us." Bennett, who has also been recorded multiple times, said she tried raising concerns to a female officer with whom she's developed a positive rapport. But when she tried to explain, from one woman to another how she felt, the officer "had no empathy whatsoever." "It deters us from even like having visits with our own families," she said. "It's something that affects us every single day. You're having non-confrontational regular encounters with staff and they're directing their bodies at you. ... It's like they're trying to create a hostile environment." Colmes-Holbrook said that from 2000 to 2009, she followed procedure because she wanted to be a model inmate. She said that in 2009, an MDOC officer asked her to scoot to the edge of a chair, put her legs in the air, and touch her heels together. She then had to place her hands around her buttocks and spread her labia for a search. Now, with the recordings and her own track record of never being accused or in possession of contraband, she feels the prison is in a new era of violation-even though she knows the resilience of her fellow inmates. "What it has done to my mental health, to the autonomy of my body, is something that I take very seriously," she said. "I've experienced not only sexual abuse; I've experienced various forms of domestic violence. I take it very seriously to be able to say 'yes' and 'no' when I mean 'yes' and when I mean 'no.' Jane Doe, who was sexually assaulted by two male guards at a previous facility also in Michigan, said she and the other plaintiffs who've signed onto this litigation are doing so because they know it's a violation of the department's own policies. "You can't commit voyeurism," she said. "If you're watching it and you're putting it on camera, that's the epitome of voyeurism. And so if you're violating your own policy, why would we not challenge it?" "To protect us, that's what they're supposed to do," she added. "And they weren't protecting us. We're all trying to help as much as we can [with the lawsuit] because we're trying to help ourselves." Towle felt oppressed and then depressed from her being recorded. She said it "triggered" her past history of being sexually abused. "We're still human beings, whether we're in prison or not," Towle said. "It seems like a lot of people don't consider us to be human beings. If you become incarcerated, but once you walk out the door, then you're a human being again. "It just doesn't make sense to me that we are not given the respect as other human beings, and what really gets me is that it was other females doing this to us. This was intentional. This is not professional. They planned this out and they did this to us." Related Articles Reddit Sues AI Provider for Breach of ContractSky High Cost of Prince Harry's Police Security Lawsuit RevealedWoman Suing Taylor Swift Asks Her Attorneys to Help Her in the CaseRas Baraka Sues Over ICE Facility Arrest as Campaign Heats Up 2025 NEWSWEEK DIGITAL LLC.
WIRED
9 hours ago
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What Really Happened in the Aftermath of the Lizard Squad Hacks
Jun 5, 2025 6:00 AM On Christmas Day in 2014 hackers knocked out the Xbox and PlayStation gaming networks, impacting how video game companies handled cybersecurity for years. Photo-Illustration:The Andersons are Christmas traditionalists. Dan says it's more his wife Paige than him, but secretly he also loves all the fuss. So, there they were on the sofa in their pajamas in front of the twinkling Christmas tree before the sun had risen over a chilly morning in Buffalo, New York. Thirty-two-year-old Dan was proud and smug as he handed over his gift to Paige—a 'fancy new Kindle Voyage.' She loved it. Then it was his turn, and he excitedly ripped into the wrapping paper watched over by his confused dogs—one of which was tellingly named after Dan's favorite computer-game character (Vivi from Final Fantasy ). As the present revealed itself, the avid gamer saw the instantly recognizable and much-loved logo—it was a brand-new PlayStation 4. Straight away he unpacked it, rigged it up to the TV, and switched it on. The plan was to get it fired up and download LittleBigPlanet 3 to play for a few hours before meeting up with family. Paige had been looking forward to it since she bought the new console. However, it wasn't to be. 'We didn't even make it as far as starting to download the game, because it wouldn't let me log in to PlayStation Network,' Dan said. 'Nothing was online at all, so we couldn't even try and download games.' Disappointedly they headed out for the day's events and couldn't try again until that evening, when they discovered that the network was still down. A $400 gift they couldn't play. Dan had to work the next day too, so he couldn't even try it then. He was gutted. Courtesy of Elliott and Thompson Buy This Book At: If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more. Five hundred and fifty miles north, in Toronto, 16-year-old Mustafa Aijaz was pumped. Christmas Day—particularly the evening—was the best game time of the year. It's always been a bit of a holiday within the holiday for serious players. The tradition revolves around a phenomenon called 'Christmas Noobs.' At Christmas, so many new players receive new games and consoles that online games are flooded with a tidal wave of gamers who often fumble their way through the top games and act like cannon fodder for the waiting legions of seasoned veterans. Mustafa and his mates were skilled at Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare . 'We were all ready for a night of easy wins, quick XP [experience points] farming, and were looking forward to leveling up like crazy.' So, they waited like crocodiles anticipating herds of migrating buffalo to enter the river. But just as the bullets started flying they were all unceremoniously chucked out of their matches and knocked offline. 'None of us could log back in, and party chat was down too, so we couldn't even talk to each other to figure out what was happening,' Mustafa said. It was all over social media: A group of hackers called Lizard Squad were bragging about their massive DDoS attack on Xbox Live and PlayStation Network—the crucial services that linked tens of millions of gamers to the Microsoft and Sony servers. Mustafa had seen that the group had already carried out smaller-scale attacks and had for weeks been taunting and threatening a big attack. Apparently it was all linked to some silly and incomprehensible spat with a rival but minor hacking group. Mustafa was angry but also fascinated by the attack and the incredible reaction online. 'The fallout was instantaneous. People were furious,' he said. PlayStation Network at the time had about 110 million subscribers, and Xbox Live had roughly 48 million. Xbox was back to normal within 24 hours—on Boxing Day. But PlayStation struggled for longer. It didn't just affect existing subscribers. Before you can use any new games, consoles, or vouchers, you need to register them via the gaming company's servers. It was a catastrophe for the games industry, especially Sony, which had already been having a tough time after a different cyberattack the previous month. Services were down around the world. Error messages in dozens of languages were being posted as screenshots on YouTube and Twitter. There was nothing anyone could do until the engineers at Sony and Microsoft figured it out or Lizard Squad stopped the attack. Late in the evening on Boxing Day, BBC Radio 5 Live aired an interview with two members of the group. They showed zero remorse for the impact they'd had on people around the world. Twelve hours later I walked into the newsroom and was given the seemingly impossible task of 'getting a Lizard' on the evening TV bulletin at Sky News. It took hours of trawling Twitter and speaking to dozens of wannabes and fakes, but I eventually succeeded in finding contact details for a British man called Vinnie Omari. Incredibly, he lived a few miles from our newsroom in west London. He agreed to come to us for the interview and was pale, skinny, wore all black and talked fast. He was at pains to distance himself from the gang but left the studios promising that a Lizard Squad hacker called 'Ryan' would be in touch. I had no idea at the time of course that this 'Ryan' was Julius Kivimäki—an already infamous teenage hacker and delinquent from Finland. It was later that afternoon—at around 3 pm —that 'Ryan' called through on Skype. Just in time for us to edit our conversation with him into our news piece. The 17-year-old looked very young and pale and had a shaved head and soft features. In spite of everything, he was polite and seemed in no rush. But he was also utterly unremorseful and arrogant, struggling to stifle a smirk throughout the interview. When I started by asking him why he wanted to ruin Christmas for tens of millions of people, he gave me the same boilerplate answer about the boys doing it to amuse themselves and embarrass these tech mega corps. 'These companies make tens of millions every month from just their subscriber fees, and they should have more than enough funding to be able to protect against these attacks.' We went back and forth for about 15 minutes without him giving any hint of regret or awareness for how many people had been affected by his stunt. 'I'd be worried if those people didn't have anything better to do than play games on their consoles at Christmas Eve and Christmas Day,' he said. 'I mean, I can't really say I feel bad. I might have forced a couple of kids to spend their time with their families instead of playing games.' The interview blew up online, with more than a million views on YouTube and thousands of comments on Twitter, where many four-letter words were hurled at the Lizards. PlayStation and Xbox also received a torrent of abuse. Later they would offer a five-day extension to players' subscription periods and 10 percent off as compensation. The resulting bill for the company must easily have been in the millions. Kivimäki went on to speak to other reporters, sometimes calling himself Ryan Cleary (a reference to another hacker he had vague and likely acrimonious link to from a previous teen hacker gang called LulzSec). In one interview and debate on YouTube channel DramaAlert he is implored by Kim Dotcom to stop the silly hacker rivalries that were impacting so many innocent people. 'Hackers used to be respected; they used to have a magic about them,' Kim said, accusing Lizard Squad of harming the image of hackers around the world with their actions. Kivimäki's response is fascinating: He laughed it off as old-fashioned thinking. 'It's wrong to connect groups like Lizard Squad with, for example, L0pht from a couple of decades back,' he said. 'There's really no connection with the hacking groups of today and the hacking groups of two decades ago. The meaning is totally different now.' Although many security experts angrily railed against the media's portrayal of Lizard Squad as 'sophisticated,' people grudgingly came to accept that the Christmas attack did have a big impact on cybersecurity and the gaming industry. There's little doubt that this was not the group's motive—despite their clumsy attempts to claim so in interviews. But it was a wake-up call. Security website SecurityAffairs wrote a 'lessons learned' piece by dissecting my interview with Kivimäki. Many people considered Lizard Squad script kiddies, they wrote, adding, 'This approach is totally wrong.' The size of the attack unleashed on that day would be shrugged off by most modern sites, but DDoS attacks are still commonplace and are getting more powerful. Expensive protection services are now a must-have for any organization that needs to stay online. The attacks also started something of a cybercrime trend. In 2024 Europol unveiled an international law enforcement operation to take DDoS services down in December: 'The festive season has long been a peak period for hackers to carry out some of their most disruptive DDoS attacks, causing severe financial loss, reputational damage, and operational chaos for their victims,' the organization said in a statement. At the time of Lizard Squad's attacks, the general public was stunned. Despite Lizard Squad being on the tail end of a wave of teenage hacking groups in the 2010s, there was little awareness of the power that could be wielded by these otherwise amateur attackers. There might have been a vague feeling in the zeitgeist that 'hackers in hoodies in their bedrooms' were increasingly causing problems, but this attack was immediate, unmissable, and easy to understand. It was of course also easy to get angry about. Over the next couple of days I came back to the story with follow-ups about the fallout as other Lizard Squad members spoke to YouTubers about the so-called 'drama.' But the big thing the newsroom kept asking me was, When would these kids be arrested? Vinnie Omari was the first. On New Year's Eve he was raided by the South East Regional Organized Crime Unit, which collared him on suspicion of cyber fraud offenses committed in 2013 and 2014. It looked like the raid was for other alleged offenses involving PayPal fraud, but the search warrant, which later surfaced online, also referenced the Christmas DDoS attacks. 'They took everything: Xbox One, phones, laptops, computer USBs, etc.,' Omari told reporter William Turton from the Daily Dot. He was later cleared of any involvement. After Omari's arrest, other Lizards were taken out too. On January 16, 2015, police announced that they had arrested an 18-year-old in Southport, near Liverpool. They didn't give a name, but reporters at the Daily Mail identified him: 'The 'quiet' teenager, named locally as Jordan Lee-Bevan, was arrested during a raid at his semi-detached home in Southport, Merseyside, today, with officers seizing computers as he was taken away in a police car.' In 2016 teenager Zachary Buchta from Maryland was also arrested for his role in Lizard Squad and another group called PoodleCorp. As a boy he had been warned in 2014 about his criminal path by police who had caught him carrying out minor cybercrime activity. But he was undeterred and even changed his Twitter profile at one stage to @fbiarelosers to taunt the cops. At the same time that Buchta was arrested, Dutch police raided and arrested another 19-year-old. Bradley van Rooy, who used the names 'Uchiha' or 'UchihaLS,' was accused of conspiring with other members of Lizard Squad to operate websites that provided cyberattack-for-hire services, facilitating thousands of DDoS attacks and trafficking stolen payment card account information for thousands of victims. Bradley was put on bail for two years and eventually given a two-year suspended sentence and 180 hours of community service. The vast majority of charges against him were dropped as they had taken place when he was a minor. He ended up being convicted of the DDoS-for-hire operation and handling stolen credit cards. I tracked him down, and he openly talked about that period of his life, which he had put behind him a long time ago. 'I'm now 27, and I see the damage that I did and understand that there could have been a higher punishment,' he says. 'But then I also see that I was just a kid, and I had a troubled time at school and just fell into the hacking life after meeting the wrong people when I was playing the game RuneScape .' Bradley's journey and words track so perfectly to the experiences of almost every hacker I have met or interviewed. It's as though there is a universal constant, whereby a subset of gamers in every generation is pulled into cybercrime in exactly the same way. There are literally billions of gamers in the world, so these people represent only a tiny fraction. But it seems to be inevitable and cyclical as hacker groups rise and fall. The differentiating and more important aspect, though, is how these boys and young men react when they cross the line and are caught. So what of Julius Kivimäki, aka 'Ryan,' aka 'Ryan Cleary' and many other aliases including the by now infamous 'Zeekill'? Surely, after appearing on TV and radio admitting that he was part of the gang, he too would be rearrested sharpish? Officers did indeed visit Kivimäki to interview him, but they did not arrest him—contrary to reports in the international media. It's not clear why they took no further action, but perhaps when the teenager confidently said that police would find nothing on his computer he was right. 'They'd have to let me go,' he had cockily asserted in our interview. If so, maybe his run-in with police years earlier had taught him to cover his tracks more effectively. Or maybe he hadn't taken as much of a leading role in the DDoS attacks as he had claimed. For Finnish cybercrime cop Antti Kurittu, seeing Kivimäki on TV was especially galling. Antti had raided and arrested Kivimaki two years earlier for other cyberattacks carried out with a different teenage cyber gang called HTP. 'I remember watching your Sky News interview and just thinking 'wow, this guy is not even trying to cover up his crimes. He's just a different sort of person,'' Antti recalls. It wasn't until July 2015 that Kivimäki received his first criminal conviction. He was found guilty of the rather preposterous total of 50,700 instances of aggravated computer break-ins—one for every computer enslaved into HTPs botnet. He was also convicted of other offenses including data breach, money laundering, and being in possession of, and using, stolen credit cards. For all of these offenses, he was handed a two-year suspended sentence. If he had been an adult he could have got years behind bars, but as a minor and first-time offender he served no time in prison. So Kivimäki, just a few weeks from his 18th birthday, remained free. He began calling himself the 'Untouchable Hacker God' on Twitter. A year after Kivimäki's sentencing, in a bizarre coincidence, Antti bumped into Kivimäki in Amsterdam. It was April 2016 and Antti was walking through the departures lounge of Schiphol Airport when he passed the by-then 18-year-old. Antti did a double take, gobsmacked to see him. It was so surreal that they both found it amusing and took a selfie. After a short chat, Antti asked Kivimäki if he was now 'staying out of trouble.' Kivimäki replied, 'Of course.' But when Antti asked him for a contact email address, he made one up with '@ at the end. They laughed and went their separate ways. But, as Antti predicted, the Untouchable Hacker God would be back. Four years later he was. And this time he was linked to the cruelest cyberattack in history and had a new alias: ransom_man. Excerpt adapted from Ctrl+Alt+Chaos: How Teenage Hackers Hijack the Internet by Joe Tidy. Published by arrangement with Elliott & Thompson. Copyright © 2025 by Joe Tidy.
