http://news.ft.com/cms/s/cd05a42c-87c6-11da-8762-0000779e2340.html By James Fontanella in London January 18 2006 The FBI is investigating the hijacking of milliondollar-homepage.com - the website that earned $1m (£566,000) for its British creator Alex Tew by hosting micro-advertisements - by hackers who demanded a ransom to restore the site. Mr Tew was sent a demand for $50,000 by e-mail by a hacker, believed to be Russian. When he refused, the website crashed. The e-mail, which was made available exclusively to the Financial Times, read: "Hello u website is under us atack to stop the DDoS send us 50000$." Graham Cluley, a senior technology consultant, said: "DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack is a common way to block internet users accessing a site by flooding the website with traffic. "In August 2005 a US teenager was sentenced to five years juvenile detention for launching DDoS attacks against online sportswear retailers costing the company over $1.5m." Several gambling websites, as well as companies such as Microsoft, Ebay, Yahoo and CNN have also been victims of such attacks. Mr Tew first received a threat on January 7 from a body calling itself The Dark Group, demanding $5,000. He thought the blackmail was a hoax and took little notice. However, on Friday, Russell Weiss, president of InfoRelay,the internet server ofmilliondollarhomepage.com, told Mr Tew that the website was experiencing very high traffic and there was a risk that it could break down. On Wednesday when Mr Tew sold the final 1000 pixels on his site for $38,100 on Ebay, reaching his goal of earning $1m, the hackers intensified their attack and hijacked the website. The website should be up and running today after InfoRelay upgraded the security system. _________________________________ InfoSec News v2.0 - Coming Soon! http://www.infosecnews.org
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