Bajinder Pal Singh

It was one of the most successful stories of 2005. A college student
dreams of a website and makes a million dolalrs to pay his college
frees. No big firms, just a webpage and an idea that was worth a
million dollars.
But suddenly, his webpage is under attack. Just like the real estate
owner who had to pay up for some protection money, he too was asked to
pay or face the consequences. According to his blog, he refused to pay
up and for six days, his site faced an attack. The site is now back
and the FBI is reportedly probing the case.
Read on the amazing story.
21 year old Alex has been admitted to a business management course and
he did not wish to grow up as a passout with huge debts. So he decided
that he should launch a webpage which makes money. So he created a
huge webpage, with one million pixels, and offered to sell advertising
space with each pixel costing one dollar each. Each slot was divided
into a block of 100 pixels, since anything shorter would not be
visible. When you buy the space, you can display your logo or
advertisement at the space, which you have purchased.
In the first month alone, Alex sold three lakh pixels. It began a huge
success with many picking up the idea and starting their own clones.
Alex says that he always had a lnack for making money. As a schoolkid,
he used to draw cartoons, make comics, photocopy them and sell them
for 30p.
But if Alex was happy, some others were not. According to his blog, he
was asked to pay money or be faced to prepare the consequences. The
consequences were another new media technique. He was bombarded with a
Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, which made it very
difficult for the site to load or became completely unavailable.
A few days later, the site is again up and booming, with the last
pixel having been sold. But as his blog says, the attackers seem to
have helped him gain publicity and the site now has more visitors than
ever.