Who Hacked New York Magazine's Website?

On Sunday night, New York Magazine published a groundbreaking cover story featuring photos of and interviews with 35 of Bill Cosby's alleged victims. On early Monday morning, the magazine's website was down, showing an error page that read "This webpage is not available." Some began speculating about whether the outage was due to all the traffic generated by the Cosby story, but then the Daily Dot reported that a hacker had attacked the site. So who hacked the New York Magazine website? One Twitter user has claimed responsibility for the attack, with some very strange justifications for his actions.

New York Magazine tweeted that its website was down early this morning, and then different readers started tweeting about the problem. Eventually, Twitter user Vikingdom2016, which represents a hacking group called Vikingdom, started responding to the tweets, claiming responsibility for the website's issues. The Daily Dot spoke to the hacker, who calls himself ThreatKing. He told the Daily Dot that he successfully overwhelmed the site with a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack to overload its servers with traffic. But ThreatKing told the Daily Dot that his hack wasn't an attempt to silence Cosby's 35 alleged victims. Rather, he said he hacked the site because he hates New York City, and thus decided to attack the magazine that bears its name (I wish I was kidding):

Many stupid people at [sic] New York. I have not even seen the cover, LOL.

Vikingdom received a little bit of attention earlier this year when it claimed to have hacked a number of random government websites, including maine.gov, which was down for a few hours, according to the Daily Dot.

ThreatKing said he hates New York City because of a bad experience he had while visiting recently:

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.

Because of this, he told the Daily Dot he wants to "see people die" in New York, and that he is working to keep New York Magazine's website down for 14 hours. Later, though, ThreatKing's claim that he hasn't seen the cover was disputed by an interview he did with Quartz over Twitter. Quartz asked him what the group's motivations were for hacking the website:

Want to know a top reason? We know one of them females in the cover.

ThreatKing wouldn't elaborate on the comment, but did continue justifying the attack with a general hatred for New York City. According to Quartz:

New york, A place where the police don’t care and people run wild with fake handguns trying to ‘troll’ and record people.

He said "Ny mag, Is just the start." New York Magazine hasn't confirmed whether it knows who is responsible for the attack, and ThreatKing said he won't show proof because he won't reveal "his tools," according to Quartz.

Image: Getty Images