According to google news (;-)) the site was DDosed.
Quote:
"The site received a major DDoS attack, and DDoS protection/prevention was not included in the customer's plan," Russell Weiss of InfoRelay Online Systems told Netcraft. InfoRelay is the owner and operator of Sitelutions, which hosts the Million Dollar Homepage.
Source:
http://www.mediabuyerplanner.com/2006/01/16/million_dollar_homepage/index.php
http://www.itnews.com.au/newsstory.aspx?CIaNID=21786&src=site-marq |
Who has a reason to bring down that site?
Competitors with Million Dollar spin offs? |
Envy? Bored? Showing the ability?
You choose |
He's got his million dollars, he's off now. :p |
He promised to be up for 5 years. Now he's down and everybody could ask for their money back :) |
Who thinks to by DoS protection on their hosting plan? What kind of a bogus host would knowingly allow a site to be subjected to a DoS? That's completely irresponsible. |
My business (Blue Fox Business Opportunities) bought space on the site. As soon as the site comes back on-line, we expect more traffic than ever before. The more this DOS attack gets media coverage, the more popular the site will become. |
Blue Fox, I never thought of this but of course you're absolutely right! |
I call BS....He turned it off himself
traceroute goes in there fine:
10 pos3-2.gsr12416.pao.he.net (65.19.129.1) 47.154 ms 47.772 ms 46.804 ms
11 pos3-1.gsr12416.ash.he.net (216.218.254.206) 123.813 ms 251.384 ms 102.006 ms
12 106.41.66.216.in-addr.arpa (216.66.41.106) 294.374 ms 298.024 ms 212.149 ms
13 69.26.178.167 (69.26.178.167) 100.524 ms 101.694 ms 97.013 ms
all services seem to be turned off on that IP (nmap) |
Maybe he turned it off on purpose after the DDoS 'cause his traffic exceed to the point he can't pay for it anymore?
Oh wait, that guy's a millionaire! |
he was the victim of an extortion racket.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4621158.stm
Mr Tew's encounter with the net criminals began on 7 January when he received an e-mail threatening to bombard the site with data unless he paid a ransom of $5,000 (£2,800).
He did not respond and the 10 January deadline passed without incident. But the following day the site went down, and has only been up intermittently since then.
A series of other e-mails, upping the ransom to $50,000 (£28,000), followed. |
up again, but very slow.
He really did it, the whole place is pasted with ads.
One day, I will talk about this with my grandchildern :o) |
amazing that he did it. utterly amazing.
such a simple idea. |
German Spiegel Online also reports Alex Tew has been black-mailed. Here's a photo of him:
http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/politik/0,1518,grossbild-566797-395952,00.html |
That's brilliant. He hacked himself to return to media. He does deserve that million. He's a genius. |
And now Alex Tew is threatened to be sued by one advertiser because of the outage. Possibly, the party suing – the guy who bought the last pixels on eBay – do this for the publicity.
"Alex Tew, the Swindon student who made $1m out of selling advertising space on his website, faces the threat of legal action after hackers crashed the site.
The winner of the last 1,000 pixels, which sold for $38,100 on Ebay and took Mr Tews earnings over $1m (£570,000), is threatening to sue because the website was off line for six days until Wednesday."
http://news.ft.com/cms/s/c786049e-8927-11da-94a6-0000779e2340.html
And I'm not sure Alex himself minds yet another round of publicity. There have been several news-worthy phases so far:
1. Student comes up with original idea to make money. Will it work?
2. Student actually succeeds in getting advertisers, is nearing the million – it works.
3. So many spin offs, the web is going crazy.
4. The last pixels are for sale on eBay, scoring high bids.
5. A DDoS attack is bringing down the servers of Alex. Who's behind this?
6. Alex has been blackmailed. The blackmailers were behind the attack.
7. Because of the outage, Alex is now being sued...
How will this soap opera continue? :) |
