David Airey Gets Hacked and Hijacked

Jason December 20th, 2007 Blogging

Graphic Designer and blogger David Airey decided to take a month long vacation last month. That was a mistake he’ll probably be regretting for a while.

I’ve been reading David’s fantastic blog for quite a while now and have always been impressed with his fantastic sense of style. He lives in Scotland and is pretty active in the blogosphere. Many of you have undoubtedly heard about him. He recently ran a huge contest which I talked about on my this site.

Needless to say, I was shocked when I checked my Reader this morning and read the following:

As many of you know, I left for vacation last month. In hindsight, I shouldÃ¢â‚¬â„¢ve kept this information private.

On the day I left, a hacker logged into my webhost support site and asked for the details to transfer the www.davidairey.com domain.

Ordinarily, this wouldnÃ¢â‚¬â„¢t have allowed them to steal my domain, but they must also have had access to my Gmail account, from where they could verify the transfer. The passwords were different, and itÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s one of those things IÃ¢â‚¬â„¢d love to know how it was done.

At present, IÃ¢â‚¬â„¢m using www.davidairey.co.uk for my website, and will continue to do so whilst I initiate court proceedings.

Unbelievable! This hacker not only gained access to his site, but he gained access to David’s email and was able to transfer the entire domain. Basically, the hacker came in and hijacked David Airey’s entire website and stole every bit of his content. And make no mistake, this was every bit as bad as someone breaking into a bank and stealing all of the money out of the vault.

If you go to David’s old site (which I don’t recommend) all you’ll see is a bunch of ads. This hacker is simply trying to make money off the traffic that David has built up with his hard work and name recognition.

I’m not sure why the hacker went through so much trouble to steal David Airey’s site even if he does get a lot of traffic. I don’t know how much money someone could make off of ads like these, but it seems to me like most of the people coming to David’s site would quickly realize something was wrong and leave the site…although I’m sure many would probably leave by clicking one of the ads. This would make the hacker some money in the short term but there’s no way he could keep the domain for any length of time. I guess it doesn’t really matter.

What a freaking waste of time and energy for David to have to go through all the trouble to actually have to file a lawsuit to get HIS domain back. All he did was go on vacation and now he’s going to be out the time and expense of going through legal channels to regain what is legally his; what he lost through no fault or action of his own, while the perpetrator will undoubtedly sneak off into the night without a second look back. Do you think this person will ever be caught? Not likely.

David’s new site can be found right here. You can read about what’s going on with him and keep up to date with this issue there. He’s also asking people to change any links to his site to reflect his new web address.

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