Original million dollar homepage hijacked!
January 19, 2006The original Million Dollar Homepage of Briton Alex Tew was recently brought down by a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack.
Alex Tew, 21, hit the headlines at the start of the year when he revealed his Million Dollar Homepage had made him a million dollars in four months. But the publicity brought the unwanted attention of extortionists who knocked the site over with a massive denial-of-service attack.
Nearing the US$ 1,000,000 mark, Tew received demands for US$ 50,000 from what was apparently a Russian group of hackers in exchange for not continuing a planned attack to the site. He did not heed the threat, and a few days after, his site was brought to a crawling halt.
The malicious hacker’s e-mail was shared exclusively with the Financial Times, which quoted it to read:
Hello u website is under us atack to stop the DDoS send us 50000$.
You can be sure to trust kids with bad grammar to bring down an innovative, revenue-generating site.
(via DIGG)
