The Slatest

Hacking Attack Crashes New York Site After Massive Cosby Story Goes Online (Update: It’s Back)

New York’s Cosby cover.

New York via Jezebel

Update, 3 p.m.: Nymag.com and its Cosby story are back online.

Original post, 10:28 a.m.: On Sunday night New York magazine posted a massive package about the women who have accused Bill Cosby of sexual assault, 35 of whom spoke to reporter Noreen Malone—many of them in great detail—and posed for portraits that were collected in the striking cover image above. Soon thereafter, though, nymag.com became unavailable, which seemed like it might be a consequence of heavy traffic from readers looking for the Cosby piece. The Daily Dot site, however, reports that New York appears to have actually been taken out by a random hacker with a grudge against New York City itself:

A self-described hacker called ThreatKing, who says he hates New York City, claims he has successfully overwhelmed the site with a distributed denial of service attack, overloading its servers with traffic … It’s not, ThreatKing said, an attempt to silence the 35 women who have come forth to describe their alleged assault, nor the magazine that pieced their story together. Instead, he claimed, this stems entirely from his dislike of New York City, which he extends to magazines that share its name.  

“Many stupid people at [sic] New York,” ThreatKing told The Daily Dot over a Skype chat. “I have not even seen the cover, LOL,” he said.

New York’s site seems to have been flooded by a distributed denial-of-service attack sometime around 1 a.m. Monday and as of now is still down.