Hackers bullying Internet Genius
This article is a follow up of another written about a guy who was selling advertising on a website to make money to pay for college.
While it was going really well, this article discusses an incident where the British student who owned the website, Alex Tew, was threatened by hackers. They told Alex if he didn't pay them $50,000, which was only 5% of what he made off of the site so far, that they would hack into (shut down) his site.
"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."
Now, considering people actually paid to have their advertisements on the website, do you think it was worth the risk of losing the site completely for the $50,000 dollars of the $1,000,000?
If he lost the website completely, his customers probably would've been pretty upset and he could've possibly had to given them their money back.
If he would've given in to the $50,000 dollars and there was an article published about it, wouldn't others try to do the same and then he'd lose way more than just $50,000?
Did the time it take to get the website back up and running outweigh the $50,000 he could've paid to the hackers?
I think he did the right thing just because you can't always do something just because of fear and since the website is a simple design, while I have no idea how long it took him to get it back up and running, it probably was worth not giving up the money for school.
What do you think?
3 comments:
I also think that he was right in not giving up the money. Being a webmistress myself, I can understand the time and effort put into making a website, valuable time that could be spent doing other things like making money. However, I can also tell you that any smart webmaster or webmistress is going to have a back-up copy of their website, if only for editing purposes. Yes, getting the passwords reset will take time, and so will getting the site back up and running, but the time put into the site to get it back up and running probably wouldn't amount to the $50,000 that the hackers were asking for.
Despite my own opinions, I can't help but think about the potential lost revenue from the site going down. Because it doesn't say how long the site was down for, I'm not really sure how much he would have lost, so while I am aware of this potential lost revenue, I'm only seeing it as potential. There are so many other things that could come into account here, including the idea that the advertisers are paying for their time by the month, rather than by the day or hour. If this were the case, then any lost revenue might be non-existant. With so many unknowns here, I'm having trouble trying to see if my decision would be swayed by this.
I also agree that giving up the money was not in his best interest. If he would have given into the hackers and gave them $50,000 I am sure that either the same hackers would be back for more or another group of hackers would be after some money. Even though he had his site shut down for short time I think that he did a good thing by taking a stand against the hackers and not giving into their demands. If Paige is right in saying you can back up your website and Alex Tew had done that, I definately think that he made the right decision because then it didn't cost him the time or the money. But because we don't know if he did have the back-up copy, I think that in the long run he made the right decision, even though it had cost him some time to get his website up and running again.
I visited Alex Tew's web site "The million dollar homepage", i was a little bit dizzy when i enter that page. That is a good way to make money. And I agree with what he did. Give moeny to hackers is a very bad way to solve this kind of problem. Even so $50,000 is only 5% of what he had made, but if he give the hackers money, this would become a bad start. No matter were those hackers real or not, paying money to hackers would be a very bad example for other sites holders. Hackers will keep doing this kind of rub. Maybe we just improve out firewall conttact the police or just ignore those emails.
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