Australian domain name industry veteran Michael Gilmour has been receiving death threats after writing a series of articles on his blog that warned domain name buyers of a new industry scam.According to news reports, the Australian Federal Police refused to investigate the hack as Gilmour’s websites and the attackers looking to silence him are outside Australia. But CERT Australia, Australia’s official national computer emergency response team located within the Attorney-General’s Department, has confirmed it is looking into the matter.Gilmour, who has worked in the internet industry for two decades now runs a company called ParkLogic that manages domain name portfolios to maximise revenues, outed “the practice of unscrupulous domain name owners directing botnets of thousands of infected computers to repeatedly click on ads on their parked websites,” reported Australia’s Fairfax media. “This is known as fraudulent traffic and Gilmour is concerned because it brings down advertising rates for all players as the thousands of clicks are artificial and don’t result in any purchases.””They write little applications which can click on advertising – Google and Yahoo’s business models are based on pay per click,” he explained to Fairfax.”It devalues the whole industry. If someone pumps fraudulent traffic through our network then it devalues the quality traffic.””Gilmour set about exposing the practice on his blog, deciding not to name and shame people in the first instance. He estimates that the fraudulent behaviour is worth about $500 million and the huge sums involved meant he was immediately targeted.”He began receiving threats from people who said they would kill him if he didn’t take down his blog. The attackers also knocked all of his websites offline by flooding them with traffic in what is known as a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.”‘I wrote about this and someone decided to take exception and they fired off a DDoS attack against my blog which took it down; they then fired off a DDoS attack against my company’s website, then moved back to michaelgilmour.com which points to my blog and I’ve been under DDoS attack for the last two weeks,’ said Gilmour.”The full version of the Fairfax Media report is available in The Age at www.theage.com.au/business/bolton-company-faces-windup-over-tax-dispute-20110908-1jzy8.html.
Australian Domain Industry Veteran Receives Death Threats From Hackers
Australian domain name industry veteran Michael Gilmour has been receiving death threats after writing a series of articles on his blog that warned domain name buyers of a new industry scam.
