A hacker took down New York Magazine's website shortly after the magazine published its cover story on Monday featuring 35 of Bill Cosby's alleged victims of sexual abuse, according to New York Daily News.
The hacker, who goes by the alias "ThreatKing," shut down the publication's website by overwhelming the platform with a distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS) and overloading its servers with traffic. The company worked around the clock to get the website back up and running, which ultimately happened 12 hours later.
However, the hacking was not an attempt to silence the 35 women who have accused Cosby of sexual assault. The hacker first disclosed the incident via his Twitter account called "Vikingdom2016," stating that the attack was motivated by his dislike towards New York City because of a recent visit, Newsweek reported.
"Many stupid people at New York," ThreatKing said. "I have not even seen the cover, LOL."
"I went to New York 2 months ago. It was really bad," the hacker 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."
That's why, he explains, he "(wants) to see people die at [sic] New York." "I've seen many pranks gone wrong at New York. That got me pissed. That's why I chose New York.
"I'll try my best to keep (New York) offline for 14 hours," ThreatKing said, adding, strangely, that "we would control the Internet if we had enough money. Because each server costs money," according to The Daily Dot.
The hacker also provided a link to Vikingdom's Soundcloud page with a recording captioned, "Warning Message to the United States," a robotic voice says "We are going to destroy state websites, city websites, agency websites and court websites of the United States. You have took [sic] away our country and its time to get it back by destroying the United States."
