Ülemiste bombing suspect identified as well-known hacker
The alleged culprit in Saturday's trash can bombing at Estonia's biggest shopping center is well-known to authorities and has been convicted of large-scale hacking and threats of violence in the past, Delfi reported.
In 2021, Artur Boiko, now 60, hacked into the Estonian state IT system, downloading hundreds of thousands of confidential files.
He was taken into custody only in March 2022, after he began threatening a state official and that official's family.
The threats related to the banning of Russian TV channels in the aftermath of the invasion of Ukraine.
In June 2022, he was convicted of both making threats and hacking a computer system in a vital sector, from which he exploited a security vulnerability to download nearly 300,000 document images and other sensitive personal data.
This was not Boiko's first conviction for hacking — back in 2013, Tartu County Court issued a penalty in a criminal case concerning sending over two million automated queries to a certification authority's test page two years earlier, in 2011.
The mass queries attempted to match personal identification codes with the mobile phone subscriber numbers linked to those codes, which in turn could identify individuals who held a Mobile-ID usage certificate at the time.
He was also convicted of threats of violence in that case, namely threatening the judge in the case with bodily harm and with murder.
Boiko, a stateless person, resided in the Nõmme district of Tallinn, Delfi reported, and neighbors said he mostly kept himself to himself, though other sources the portal spoke to said he had made online threats on other occasions, for instance towards the head of the consumer protection agency, the TTJA.
Though allegedly Boiko placed an explosive device in a trash can in the Ülemiste keskus as a means of extracting revenge, Delfi reported it is not yet clear what his issue with the mall was.
One person was hospitalized after the explosion inside the Ülemiste keskus mall at a little after 6:45 p.m. Saturday. The Police and Border Guard Board (PPA) and the Rescue Board (Päästeamet) evacuated the center as a result, while some shoppers were either unable to get to their vehicles parked in an underground parking lot, or were unable to exit the parking lot for around half an hour after the incident.
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Editor: Andrew Whyte
Source: Delfi
