The Daily Dot reports that last night, not long after the already highly-circulated, harrowing piece containing the accounts of 35 women who’ve accused Bill Cosby of sexual assault went up on New York Magazine‘s website, the magazine’s website was hacked.
The message from the hacker — named ThreatKing — did not seem to be directly linked to the article, but, far more arbitrarily, about how much he “hates New York City.” ThreatKing managed to preclude access to the website completely — and that still seems to be the case this morning (allegedly, he planned for the site to be down for 14 hours).
The Daily Dot skyped with the hacker, who confirmed that his intentions had nothing to do with the massive article — though it was certainly well timed to initially seem like it did. ThreatKing, rather, very eloquently said, “Many stupid people at [sic] New York…I have not even seen the cover, LOL.”
Apparently, if the hacker’s truly being transparent, it all boils down to a New York vacation not meeting expectations:
I went to new York 2 months ago. It was really bad. 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.
Of course, most people find New York to be in some way adversarial — and I suppose we can only be thankful that every time a pigeon poops on someone’s shoulder or a New American restaurant’s foie gras farro donut doesn’t meet their standards, we’re not prevented from accessing one of the week’s most important articles.
Despite this all seeming amusingly absurd, the hacker delved into some more disturbing territory during the Skype chat. He claims to be part of Vikingdom, a group that’s formerly hacked government websites, and, in a link he gave The Daily Dot to the group’s Soundcloud, claims:
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 its time to get it back by destroying the United States.
ThreatKing says the group is working on plans for future NYC hacks, including the NYC FBI bureau and The New York Times.