Hack Attack On MillionDollarHomepage.com
Published: Thursday, January 19, 2006 Online-Casinos.com
HACK ATTACK ON MILLIONDOLLARHOMEPAGE.COM
Russian techno-crooks launch DDoS blackmail
Most readers will be familiar with the ingenious marketing innovation that made
21 year old British business studies student Alex Tew a huge amount of
money in a short space of time...but there have been bumps in the road to riches
this week it appears.
The Financial Times reported that the FBI is assisting in investigating the
hijacking of milliondollarhomepage.com - the website that earned US$1million
(GBP 566,000) for its British creator - by hackers who demanded a ransom to
restore the site.
The Times reports that Tew was sent an emailed demand for $50,000 by a hacker
who is believed to be Russian. When he refused, the website crashed. The email
read: "Hello u website is under us atack to stop the DDoS send us 50000$."
DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack is a common way to block internet
users accessing a site, thus crashing it by flooding the website with traffic,
often from "zombie" computers under the hackers' illegal control.
Several gambling websites, as well as companies such as Microsoft, Ebay, Yahoo
and CNN have been victims of such attacks.
Mr Tew initially thought the blackmail was a hoax and took little notice. However
InfoRelay,the internet server of milliondollarhomepage.com, later told
Tew that the website was experiencing very high traffic and there was a risk
that it could break down.
Later still, as Tew sold the final 1000 pixels on his site for $38,100 on Ebay,
reaching his goal of earning $1mllion, the hackers intensified their attack
and hijacked the website.
The website was soon back online after InfoRelay upgraded the security system.
