Blackmailers take down Million Dollar Homepage

Criminals have attempted to blackmail a student who built a website that earned him a small fortune.

Alex Tew, creator of the website milliondollarhomepage.com, has received quite a bit of attention for selling advertisers pixel space on his website's front page. Earlier this month, around the time news broke that he had sold out his page for slightly more than $1m, extortionists threatened to take his website offline unless he paid $5,000.

The blackmailers said they would use a denial of service attack to bombard Tew's server with data so it would be unable to handle the sudden influx of internet traffic.

On his blog, Tew wrote: "I can confirm that MillionDollarHomepage.com has been subjected to a distributed denial-of-service 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 [sic]. The FBI are [sic] 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."

The BBC reports that Tew has received further demands for $50,000 from the gang.

Although the site has been slow to load over the past few days, at the time of writing it was up and running.

Tew, who lives in the UK, is said to have contacted the National Hi-Tech Crime Unit, which believes the attacks originate in Russia.