Russian hackers hold website to ransom

The website of a British student who sold pixels to pay his way through college has been knocked over by a denial of service attack that police believe was launched by Russian hackers.

Alex Tew's Million Dollar Homepage, on which he sells pixels to advertisers, has already netted the student-come-entrepreneur more than $US1 million ($1.3 million). However the publicity associated with his success has also attracted criminal interest.

Mr Tew wrote on his blog: "I can confirm that MillionDollarHomepage.com has been subjected to a DDoS [distributed denial of service] attack by malicious hackers who have caused the site to be extremely slow loading or completely unavailable since last Thursday, 12 January 2006.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/breaking/russian-hackers-hold-website-to-ransom/2006/01/19/1137553695238.html