About

ThreatKing, also known as Vikingdom, is a black hat hacker who gained much notoriety for taking down the New York Magazine website with a massive distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS) in July 2015.

History

On March 31st, 2015, the Indiana state government website was taken down with a DDoS attack. That day, the @YourVikingdom2015 Twitter feed claimed responsibility for the attack, with many speculating the act was motivated by an objection to the state's Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

New York Mag DDoS

On July 26th, 2015, New York Magazine released an article about the recent wave of rape allegations against comedian Bill Cosby. On the following day, the @Vikingdom2016 Twitter account took responsibility for taking down the website NYmag.com (shown below, left). Shortly after, the @NYMag Twitter feed acknowledged the downtime, alerting readers the they were "working on a fix" (shown below, right).

That day, many speculated that ThreatKing had been motivated to take down the website due to the Bill Cosby article. ThreatKing to the rumors by tweeting that he did not like New York (shown below). Additionally, he linked to a Twitter search page^[2] listing various New York news publications as potential targets.

By July 29th, the @Vikingdom2016 Twitter feed had been suspended. In the coming days, several news sites reported on the NY Mag DDoS, including Venture Beat,^[4] The Daily Dot^[5] and Daily Mail.^[6]

Search Interest

Not available.

External References