Posted on 01/18/2006 7:00:40 PM PST by Born Conservative
LONDON - A Web site that earned an enterprising British student $1 million suffered a crippling attack by ransom-seeking hackers.
Alex Tew, 21, said Wednesday that his Million Dollar Homepage was targeted after he publicized how it had helped him raise money for his university studies.
Tew had sold 10,000 small squares of advertising space on the Web site for $100 each, achieving his target in four months. His initiative spawned several copycat sites.
But Tew said that on Jan. 7, he received a threat from an organization calling itself "The Dark Group," demanding that he pay them $50,000 within 72 hours or face having his site taken down.
"It was written in poor English, but the hackers asked for $50,000, saying that it was just 5 percent of what I had made," Tew said. "I did not reply to the e-mail. I had no intention of paying."
Tew ignored the threat. Hackers then initiated a so-called distributed denial of service, in which attackers take command of third-party computers, through a virus or other security vulnerability, and instruct them to send junk data to the target site, overwhelming servers and causing the site to crash or perform poorly.
Tew said the site now works normally.
Tew, from Wiltshire, a county in southern England, said he informed the FBI because his site is hosted in the United States.
FBI spokesman Paul Bresson said the agency was investigating.
Such extortion cases targeting Web sites are occurring with greater frequency.
If I don't get $50,000 from the FReepers, I will post insane rants of Al Gore and Howard Dean on this website.
YEEAAAAAUUUUUGGGGHHHH!!!!!
The last 10 squares sold on Ebay for over $152,000. The biggest ad on the page is selling now on ebay. The rentmypixel ad sells ads and traffic and makes over $5k per month, it is selling for I think I saw 12k.
"If I don't get $50,000 from the FReepers, I will post insane rants of Al Gore and Howard Dean on this website."
If you don't give me half of that $50K, I'll believe them. 8)
He didn't. He only committed to 5 years. "The site and homepage will be online for at least 5 years "
yeah, but, if it was yearly... it would of been five times as much if the site is only up for the five years.
which it now may be able to stay up just because everybody will want to run on his site instead of the copycats.
i do understand why he prolly had to though since it had never been done before. so the five years made it very appealing to the advertizers.
still one hell of an idea.
You doing a 'Jesse' shakedown on me? LOL
ROFL! No, no, a 'Jesse' shakedown would involve at least two bastards, him and his'n, and at least one followup extortion attempt by Al Sharpton. I'm just the one bastard, and the only ways to get Al Sharpton anywhere near FR would involve a cattle prod or sharp pointy sticks. LONG, sharp pointy sticks to hit a nerve through all that blubber.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.