Hack Attack
by Jeffrey Toobin January 19, 2009
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2009/01/19/090119ta_talk_toobinLate last Tuesday night, Pam Spaulding tried to post an entry on her blog, Pam's House Blend, from her home in Durham, North Carolina. There was a technical glitch, and she couldn't publish her post. To find the source of the problem, Spaulding decided to go to the Web site for SoapBlox, a small company in Denver that administers the sites for more than a hundred liberal blogs around the country, including Pam's House Blend, which focusses on gay and lesbian issues. There the evidence of hacking was obvious:
SoapBlox.net had been redesigned, with a logo of a hand and a message that said "destroying online communities." Spaulding tried to reach the owner and sole employee of SoapBlox, Paul Preston, but he was already overwhelmed by similar complaints from blogs around the country. "When I woke up on Wednesday," Preston said, "I started checking my phone and e-mail, and people were like, 'Oh my God!' "
