Helsingius, Johan

During the mid-1990s, hackers around the world were arrested for their exploits, and the media took every opportunity to color them as criminals. One of the highly publicized cases was that of Johan Helsingius (a.k.a. Julf), a Finnish hacker who ran the most subscribed anonymous remailer, penet.fi, on a run-of-the-mill 486 computer with a 200-megatbyte hard drive. In July 1995, his premises were raided by the police after the Church of Scientology filed a complaint that a penet.fi customer was posting the Church’s “secrets” on the Internet. The Finnish court eventually ruled that Helsingius must reveal the customer’s email address. In contrast to most hackers, Johan did not have a moniker and did not post himself anonymously on the Web.

On May 20, 2005, Johan’s Web page was down. A note on this Web page pointed to the cracking efforts of spammers and virus writers: http://www.julf.com/.

See Also: Anonymity; Anonymous Remailer; Electronic Mail or Email; Exploit; Hacker; Internet; Moniker.