Hacker Interview Puts Think Magazine in National Spotlight

After Think Magazine's Adam Peck scored an instant-message interview with the group that hacked a Fox News Twitter account on Sunday night, the Stony Brook University student-run publication has been shoved into the national spotlight.

Media outlets including The New York Times, Huffington Post, Washington Post, Associated Press, NPR, and BBC picked up Think's story on the Script Kiddies, who posted tweets claiming that President Barack Obama had been assassinated. Some of those media outlets began contacting Peck himself for interviews, and he was even invited on a radio show based in Chicago.

In an interview with Patch on Thursday, Peck said he published the original article around 1:30 a.m. Monday, then called it a night. By the time he woke up Tuesday morning Think's website was getting thousands and thousands of hits, eventually crashing it.

"Our website by the morning was getting so much traffic that our servers couldn’t handle it," said Peck, 23, who will graduate from Stony Brook in December. "By 11:30 or so the website had gone down. There was about an hour where people couldn’t see the story."

The site received 150,000 hits in four hours that day, Peck said, and in the days since, traffic has been "hovering around 20,000 to 40,000 hits per day."

David Mazza, who hosts thinksb.com and several other websites on his own server, said he hadn't even heard the story of the Fox News Twitter hack until Peck called him about the website crash – and what had likely caused it.

"I was pretty impressed that he got that interview and no one else did. ... It's fair to say that almost any server could have gone down," said Mazza, the former vice president for communications for the undergraduate student government.

Peck, who relinquished editor duties to a colleague this summer, said it's the first time the magazine has gotten this kind of national attention, and called it perhaps his first career benchmark. But he's not really thinking about that right now.

"This story ... is nowhere near done at this point," Peck said. "It’s hard to focus on anything beyond what’s going to happen these next few days."

Since then, The Huffington Post reported the Secret Service will be investigating the hack, and Peck said he has plans to possibly publish the full interview with the Script Kiddies, which took place via instant messenger. He will be discussing the situation with the Student Press Law Center, an organization which often guides student journalists through situations like these.

Representatives of the Student Press Law Center, Stony Brook University, and the Undergraduate Student Government did not respond to requests for comment.