A hacker shut down the New York Magazine website within hours of publishing its powerful article, featuring 35 women accusing Bill Cosby of sexual abuse.
The website crashed yesterday afternoon after highlighting the article picturing alleged victims of assault, and offering links to several women’s stories via social media.
Several hours after the site was down the publication tweeted “Our site is experiencing technical difficulties. We are aware of the issue, and working on a fix.”
The article titled "Cosby: The Women. An unwelcome sisterhood" was back on the magazine's website after a breif outage.
Agreeing to be photographed and interviewed by the magazine, 35 of the 46 women who are accusing Cosby of rape or sexual assualt are featured on the website.
These personal and at times shocking accounts of sexual abuse have received huge public attention. The article has already received nearly 80,000 shares via Facebook and Twitter.
Despite the apparent hackers efforts in shutting down the website, the magazine had started building social media attention through posts (pictured below) on Twitter.
The website's alleged hacker, who goes under the handle "ThreatKing", is believed to have attacked the website due to a hatred of New York City and not because of the Cosby article, media reports said.
Joyce Emmons: one of the 35 women accusing Bill Cosby of sexual abuse, featured in the NY Magazine article. Source: NY Magazine
Taking credit for the cyber-attack through the twitter handle @Vikingdom2016, "ThreatKing" tweeted “Nymag.com will be down for hours.... :D ENJO,” later adding, “Lol, we ruined New York big night.”
The hacker apparently told online newspaper, the Daily Dot, his or her hatred of New York stems from a recent visit to the city.
“I went to new York 2 months ago. It was really bad,” ThreatKing said. “Someone pranked me. Everyone started laughing and shit. The first 10 hours being there. Some African-American tried to prank me with a fake hand gun.”
“I've seen many pranks gone wrong at New York,” ThreatKing said. “That got me pissed. That's why I chose New York", the Daily Dot reported.
A recorded voice at Vikingdom’s Soundcloud page says: "We are going to destroy state websites, city websites, agency websites and court websites of the United States. You have took away our country and it's time to get it back by destroying the United States."
Unperturbed by the hacking incident, New York magazine made sure the Cosby accusers' feature was accessible to the public posting a 1,700 word excerpt on its Tumblr page. The publisher had already posted excerpts on Instagram before the attack.
