We won the case. “I have no doubt left that you, Mr. Maksimov, are Hacker Hell,” the judge concluded. And there were no doubts on my side, or on the prosecution’s, or among all those who did the enormous amount of work required to unmask the “hacker.”
Sergei Maksimov was sentenced to 1 year and 5 months of probation, 3 years of supervised release, 400 hours of community service, and a small fine payable to Amnesty International. Maksimov will also have to cover the court costs. And buy himself new equipment, since his desktop computer and laptop were confiscated and will not be returned.
The “chief hacker of Runet” (the Russian-language internet) turned out to be 40-year-old Sergei Maksimov, living alone on the outskirts of Bonn with neither family nor a job. No one even came to court to support him, not once.
In person, our hero was nothing like as bold as he was online.
I am, of course, satisfied with the outcome of the trial. Three years of waiting and of working to prepare the materials were absolutely worth it. There are no more “elusive hackers” here—there is only Sergei, a worn-down refugee from Russia, claiming in a trembling voice that he did nothing and that he downloaded all the materials from the internet. No one believed Maksimov. In his closing statement, the prosecutor put it this way: “If you are accused of a murder you did not commit, you do not start running around collecting evidence—bringing bloodstained [items] home.”
And with that, Maksimov’s couple of weeks of “fame” are over. He is no longer of much interest to anyone—neither to us nor to anyone who may have been handling this unfortunate hacker.
Yesterday’s hearing was scheduled because at the previous one, Maksimov’s lawyer rolled out a whole list of reasons why my written testimony could not be read in court. The court adjourned for two weeks and, upon returning, the very first thing it did was read out my written testimony.
The judge also denied the defense’s other motions—for example, they proposed calling in a Google specialist to explain how passwords work for Gmail accounts.
By the fourth hearing, everyone was thoroughly tired of the process. At every session, entirely unambiguous testimony against Maksimov was read out and heard. Not a single witness testified in his defense. Maksimov himself did not say a word throughout the entire trial. The defense filed almost no motions and never produced in court the “irrefutable evidence of innocence” that Maksimov himself kept promising in interviews after each hearing.
The only truly trashy trump card the defense used at the July hearing was the claim that some Israeli newspaper had written something bad about me, that people in Israel generally dislike me, and that the mailbox had been hacked by vengeful Jewish hackers.
In his closing statement, the defense lawyer no longer merely hinted at Israeli hackers, but said outright that I have many enemies in the state authorities—including Putin—and that they are the ones hiding behind the nickname “Hacker Hell.”
For us, this trial was an excellent experience and an example of how a genuinely independent judicial system works. For “Hacker Hell,” it ended rather sadly. He was dragged through interrogations, had his door broken down during a search, had his equipment confiscated—as the instruments of the crime, after all—and was left with the status of a convicted criminal.
As for what happens next, Maksimov will probably appeal. And after the trial, guess what the ridiculous “hacker” said? That they simply had not presented all the evidence they had—but that they definitely will.
On top of that, we should probably expect further hacks intended to show that Hacker Hell’s cause is still alive. But it is unlikely that Sergei Maksimov will be carrying them out anymore, since his suspended sentence could be converted into a real prison term at any moment.
Many thanks to everyone who worked with us and helped over these three years: those who gathered the evidence from the very beginning, those who translated Hell’s graphomaniacal nonsense into German, the journalists who covered the trial, and of course our lawyer, Volkhard Schreiber, for his excellent work.
Here are a few links where you can read about the trial in Russian and German.