[ISN] Million dollar homepage brought down by DDoS attack

[InfoSec News]

http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2148578/million-dollar-homepage-felled

William Eazel
vnunet.com 
14 Jan 2006

The final 1,000 pixels on the Million Dollar Homepage sold for $38,100 
earlier this week, netting 21 year old UK student Alex Tew the final 
amount needed to cross the US$1 million target barrier.

However, disaster struck early yesterday when the site was targeted by 
electronic attackers and knocked off the web for some extended period 
of time by a DDoS attack.

The Million Dollar Homepage, found at milliondollarhomepage.com, had 
been online since September last year, and is one of those "wish I'd 
thought of that ideas" initially dreamt up by Tew as a way of paying 
his university expenses.

The idea was simple. Tew launched a website, which he promised to keep 
online for at least five years, he then divided the homepage into a 
million pixels and sold each pixel for US$1 as advertising space.

Many advertisers are understood to have bought pixels as a joke, but 
the idea soon took off, and on the back of a wave of publicity Tew's 
site was soon receiving 500,000 unique visitors per day, with much of 
that traffic clicking through to advertisers.

Indeed, the site's total earnings actually netted Tew US$1,037,100 - a 
figure which has been the catalyst for the appearance of a number of 
other copycat sites.

Tew may be the newest internet-made millionaire, but armed with only a 
basic web hosting package, the extra fees charged for protection 
against mounting DDoS attacks, will soon be eating into his cash pile.