Website Hacking Blackmail
posted by Daniel Solove
A while back, I wrote about the Million Dollar Homepage, where Alex Tew, a student, created the idea of selling a million pixels on a website to advertisers for $1 each. His plan was successful, and he recently reached his goal of raising a million dollars in just a few months.
But the story attracted some unsavory criminals bent on ruining Tew’s enterprise. From the BBC:
But the publicity brought the unwanted attention of extortionists who knocked the site over with a massive denial-of-service attack.
Following a week of downtime, the website is now back online.
Mr Tew’s encounter with the net criminals began on 7 January when he received an e-mail threatening to bombard the site with data unless he paid a ransom of $5,000 (£2,800).
He did not respond and the 10 January deadline passed without incident. But the following day the site went down, and has only been up intermittently since then.
A series of other e-mails, upping the ransom to $50,000 (£28,000), followed.
Tew ultimately got his website back up with the help of a company, DDoSprotection.com, that combats denial-of-service attacks.
Related Posts:
1. Solove, There’s Gold in Them Pixels
January 19, 2006 at 12:44 am
Posted in: Technology
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