What? Me? Hacker? By The Headbunny Wow. I stumble home after a night of cheap Dixie beer and catfish with some friends and come home to find out I'm a very popular guy. I found a few messages on my phone (which is odd for late night since most of my pals know better than to drink and dial) - nothing odd about that. I then sit down to check email before I crash and see that I have 50 or so messages waiting for me - a little out of the ordinary. I notice I have a note from my service provider that says I passed a major bandwidth mark while I was out - very unusual. I start reading the mail and the general tone seems to be: "What the (varying degree of frustration) happened to (insert random website)!!!!!" People are claiming that I've hijacked everything from atomic-rooster.com to some sextoy shop. Very, very unusual. Buried in the email queue was a very nice note from a gentleman in the UK who said he worked for an ISP and he was one of the only people to actually have an explanation. It appeared that there had been a hack of Netnames and at least one other registrar. All the records in their possession were now pointing to Fluffybunny.com, essentially hijacking them en masse to my site. Very, very, very, unusual. A check of my referral log revealed everything from Motorcycleworld.com to Candycream.com pointing to me. Research companies, media sites, porn sites galore and even the Afghani government's site were all pumping traffic to Fluffybunny for a chunk of last night/this morning. Very, very, very, very cool. How else could I feel? For a little while my site was one of the most popular on the Internet! All this attention, just to little old me? (I am going to get such a big head over this). Needless to say my traffic counts went through the roof. It would appear that at least 100,000 people were diverted my way. Too bad I don't have a banner ad running, I could have cashed in! Ah well, no harm done (at least to me.) Now, why would someone want to point to my crappy little site? I'm glad you asked. Let me backfill the story a bit here. There is a very well known hacker out there by the name of Fluffi Bunni. He (or she) has been pretty active, especially after the WTC bombings. That's the only real connection I can draw here, but one has to admit that it makes a lot of sense given the situation. It's not as if they were astrological hackers and pointed to the scopes. Fluffi Bunni had hacked Netnames a week ago or so and they may have decided to go back and prove they could do it again even after they had 'shored up their defenses.' I have no idea who was responsible and I frankly don't really want to know. I appreciate that the person didn't hack ME. The damage seems pretty minimal so I'm not too worried about anyone coming after me. The best part of this whole situation has got to be the flood of email from people trying to figure out what the hell happened. The camps were actually pretty well divided: Site owners who had been hijacked - These were easy to spot because they contained the most threats, promises of violence and abusive language. I can't really blame them for being upset, but I can dope slap them for not thinking the situation through (and for some really bad grammar.) People looking for their favorite sites who were upset - This was the most interesting group by far, in that most of them were all related to porn sites. A lot of people's porn habits were thrown off for the night, and they were not happy. I don't even want to get into some of the stuff I was sent. People looking for favorite sites that were confused - A few people were miffed that the Ducati site was down, Gramophone magazine and the like were missing. Some people were asking why they couldn't order (I wish I knew what they were trying to order) or some other question that made it clear they didn't quite get what had happened. People looking for favorite sites that were amused - At least a good handful of people had the sense and humor to see something was wrong and get a chuckle out of it. One guy even checked a dozen sites and came back to tell me. These were the emails I appreciated the most. Some were downright 'fall off the chair' funny, which is always a good thing. Sadly, it may have happened so quickly that the news outlets may not pick up the story. I was kind of hoping for a Fluffi Bunni/Fluffybunny headline somewhere but that may be just as well. Ah well, another chance for fame (infamy?) passes me by. Looking back it's been a hell of a lot of fun. I don't want to officially endorse or condone the actions of any hackers but I really can't say anything bad either. How else could you honestly jack you traffic up by a 100,000 people with no effort? ©2001 Fluffybunny.com. All Rights Reserved. Don't make us come after you.