Million Dollar Homepage site blackmailed

18 January 2006 16:09 GMT / By Stuart Miles

The celebrations of reaching his goal of earning a million dollars in just 4 months for million dollar homepage site owner Alex Tew was short lived as the site was held to ransom and repletedly attacked by hackers with DDoS attacks.

The attacks came on the back of the announcement that the site had sold its last 1,000 pixels on ebay completing the page.

According to a post yesterday on his blog on the site, Tew said: “I can confirm that MillionDollarHomepage.com has been subjected to a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack by malicious hackers who have caused the site to be extremely slow loading or completely unavailable since last Thursday, 12th January 2006."

"I can also confirm that a demand for a substantial amount of money was made which makes this a criminal act of extorsion. The FBI are investigating and I'm currently working closely with my hosting company, Sitelutions, to bring the site back online as soon as possible. More news soon.”

According to BBC, who has more details on the story, Tew, the UK student behind the site, received an email demanding he cough up $5,000 (£2,830) or risk facing a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. He received other ransom demands of up to $50,000 (£28,300) but ignored them.

Tew told the BBC: "I haven't replied to any of them as I don't want to give them the satisfaction and I certainly don't intend to pay them any money."

Full tags

Software, Online, Websites, Milliondollarhomepage