Alex Tew

A Web site that earned an enterprising British student, named Alex
Tew, $1 million suffered a crippling attack by ransom-seeking hackers.

Alex Tew, 21, said that his Million Dollar Homepage was targeted
after he publicized how it had helped him raise money for his university
studies.

Tew had sold 10,000 small squares of advertising space on the Web
site for $100 each, achieving his target in four months. His initiative
spawned several copycat sites.

But Tew said that on Jan. 7, he received a threat from an
organization calling itself "The Dark Group," demanding that
he pay them $50,000 within 72 hours or face having his site taken down.

"It was written in poor English, but the hackers asked for
$50,000, saying that it was just 5 percent of what I had made," Tew
said. "I did not reply to the e-mail. I had no intention of
paying."

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.

Tew said the site now works normally.

Tew, from Wiltshire, a county in southern England, said he informed
the FBI because his site is hosted in the United States.

FBI spokesman Paul Bresson said the agency was investigating.

Such extortion cases
targeting Web sites are occurring with greater frequency.