Hacker: I Took Down New York Because I Hate NYC

New York's cover story on 35 women accusing Bill Cosby of sex assault was hotly tweeted last night—but this morning no one can access it after a denial-of-service attack on the magazine. Just before 1am, a Twitter account under the handle Vikingdom2016 posted, "nymag.com #OFFLINE," and sure enough, the entire New York website was down. "We are aware of the issue, and working on a fix," New York tweeted shortly after. A hacker calling himself ThreatKing claims responsibility, and tells the Daily Dot via Skype that the outage had nothing to do with the Cosby story. "I have not even seen the cover, LOL," he said. Instead, he says he was moved by his hate of the Big Apple, born of a visit two months ago.

"Many stupid people at [sic] New York," he said. He noted that within his first 10 hours in the city, "someone pranked me. Everyone started laughing and shit. … Some African-American tried to prank me with a fake hand gun." ThreatKing also included a link to Vikingdom's SoundCloud page, on which a robotic voice announces, "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." He planned to keep New York down for 14 hours—meaning it'd go back online mid-afternoon EST—and says he's got other sites in mind, especially ones with "New York" in their names. Included in a Twitter list: the New York Times, the New York Jets, and Trump Tower New York. In the meantime, the Times notes you can read a preserved version of the story here. (More hacker stories.)