Hacker says New York Magazine blackout has nothing to do with Bill Cosby cover story

User 'ThreatKing' says he blocked the site because he hated New York City

New York Magazine

An anti-NYC hacker who claims to have caused New York Magazine’s website to go offline says the cyber attack has nothing to do with the title’s Bill Cosby story.

In a piece titled ‘Cosby: The Women’, New York Magazine profiled 35 victims of alleged assault from Bill Cosby, and included an empty chair on the cover ‘to signify those who have stayed silent’.

The powerful image was shared on social media, but it wasn’t long before NYmag’s servers crashed, making the cover story inaccessible.

New York Magazine has acknowledged the site is down and took to Twitter saying they are working on restoring the website as soon as possible.

Many assumed the overwhelming interest in the story caused the servers to go down but US blog The Daily Dot claims it is has been flooded by a hacker in a completely unrelated incident.

They claim to have spoken to ‘ThreatKing’, an anti-NYC hacker who is claiming responsibility for shutting the site down, citing an intense dislike of New York City.

“An New York magazine employee, who spoke to The Daily Dot on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the attack, said they assumed the site was on the receiving end of a DDoS [distributed denial of service] attack,” the website says in a post.

“But 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.”

A DD0S attack involves manipulating a network of computers, usually by hacking into them, and using them to bombard a website with requests at the same time, rendering it unable to cope.

The post says that ThreatKing claimed responsibility for the hack under the Twitter handle @Vikingdom2016. Several tweets on their timeline directly discuss the hack, even going as far as to suggest the site data may be corrupted.

The alleged hacker told The Daily Dot that hated New York Magazine because it is named after a city with “many stupid people”.

He adds that he will try his best to keep the website offline for at least 14 hours, but that it is an expensive thing to do and his resources are limited.