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MillionDollarHomePage Hacked
John Stith
Staff Writer
2006-01-18
 Insider Reports RSS Feed
Someone always has to screw with someone who did something cool. Hackers are picking on Alex Tew, creator of the MillionDollarHomePage. Hackers were holding his site for ransom for $50,000. They sent him the note, he told them no and his site came tumbling down. The FBI is investigating the matter.
The email, given to the Financial Times, said in fairly simple terms, "Hello u website is under attack to stop the DdoS send us 50000$." The hacker is believed to be Russian. According to the Times, Tew thought the email was a hoax and disregarded the message.
Apparently, Tew received his first threats on January 7th from hackers calling themselves The Dark Group. On Friday, Tew's ISP, InfoRelay, told Tew traffic was very high and might crash.
Tew has become something of a celebrity in the Internet world because of his development of micro-advertising. He created his site of one million pixels and charged $1 for each block. After a few months he'd sold all but the last thousand pixels. He put them up on eBay for auction to finish it off and collected $38,100 for those last pixels.
Unfortunately, a denial of service attack is something anyone who runs a website may have to contend with and it's a form of extortion. While Tew's ISP will get his site back up with better security, it could probably be hit again. It is sad when someone like Tew comes up a neat and ingenious idea and becomes successful with it only to have groups begin to try and tear it down.
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About the Author:
John is a staff writer for SecurityProNews covering cyber security.
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