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[25.11.06] [Andrew Gallix]
HIJACKING DENNIS COOPER
 Through his blog, Dennis Cooper has probably established one of the closest author/reader relationships ever, which is why it was so worrying to learn that his site had been hacked into and hijacked. Here's what Cooper had to say, initially:
"I wish I had more specifics to tell you because I know very little for sure. Like I said, blogger hasn't even reported back to me. It would seem to be a deliberate attack on my blog, but why, I don't know. It and I don't have any big known enemies apart from maybe Laura Albert/JT Leroy, but it doesn't seem like she'd still be out for blood this late in the game. One thing that's always been good for me is that my novels have never become so successful that extreme moralists have discovered them and made them a target. But I suppose with the growing and pretty amazing popularity of my blog, anyone out there might have dicovered it and been extremely outraged. But I'm just fishing because I don't know why this happened. There were no direct threats made on the blog that I can remember. I don't know how the perpetrator will ever be discovered unless some tech savvy person knows how to find him/her and makes the effort."
Since then, more details have come to light:
"There's very good news. There's weird news. And there's bad news. The very good news is that, as some of you have discovered, the old blog has returned, sort of. Most importantly and thrillingly, that 'sort of' includes all of your comments. That, of course, is a gigantic relief and reason to celebrate for us all. The weird news involves exactly what happened. Blogger finally got back to me late last night, and there was some back and forth, and this is what I've managed to piece together. Last Friday, Blogger suddenly received a large volume of reports that my blog was a spam blog. When this happens, Blogger's system automatically shuts the reported blog down and puts a rediect on the address. Essentially, the blog was hacked in an indirect way, almost certainly by someone who knows how Blogger's system works. This has happened a number of times before to Blogger's blogs apparently. It's a way for someone who isn't a real hacker to get rid of a blog they don't like. When Blogger's system shuts a blog down in this way, the blog is removed and put into the equivalent of a trash can. That's why several computer whizzes told me that the blog was gone. It was. The bad news is that an unfortunate part of what happens to a blog when it's trashed by them is that, when it's retrieved and restored, there is sometimes a lot of damage. In my blog's case, there is real damage. More than 90 per cent of the images on my blog are gone and are no longer in existence in Blogger's storage area. On top of that, the blog will no longer allow images to be uploaded onto it. There's a very small chance that that latter problem could be fixed, but not much chance. It's being worked on, but chances are the old blog will remain in its empty state forever. If so, the front page of the blog is basically dead as far as I'm concerned since the images are such a key part of what I've been doing. That's really bad news to me, but you take what you can get, and the fact that the comments are there and will presumably always be there is a huge victory. So there you go. Blogger apologized for the mistake, and report that they're trying to find a way to fix this problem in the manner in which their system works. So the mystery is sort of solved, although I don't think we'll never know who instigated the problem with their false spam reports. Now we go on, and let's hope the culprit got whatever hatred they had for my blog out of their system."
Dennis Cooper's new blog is here.
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