Logo

Arrest Made in Hacking Attack on Rocker and Reality Star — and a Theory Emerges About Why He Was Targeted

Dec 14, 2011  •  Post A Comment

Authorities have made an arrest in a hacking case that targeted a famous rocker who stars in a reality show, Bloomberg reports.

The attack was against Gene Simmons, the frontman for the rock group KISS and a star of A&E’s "Gene Simmons Family Jewels," the story reports. Simmons was apparently the victim of the hacking collective Anonymous, according to the report.

Simmons’ website was allegedly shut down by Kevin George Poe, 24, of Manchester, Conn., the story says, citing the U.S. Attorney in Los Angeles. Poe, who was arrested Tuesday, is accused of launching a denial of service attack on GeneSimmons.com.

Simmons has been an outspoken critic of music piracy, the story says, and that may be why he was targeted. The story notes: “Anonymous, a group of self-styled hacker-activists behind attacks on corporate and government websites, has in the past targeted sites of organizations fighting online piracy, including the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America.”

Simmons appeared last year at a media conference and lashed out at piracy, the story reports. He’s quoted as saying: “The music industry was asleep at the wheel. It didn’t have the balls to go and sue every fresh-faced, freckle-faced college kid who downloaded material, and so now we’re left with hundreds of thousands of people without jobs. There’s no industry.”

One Comment

  1. Simmons is just as clueless as the rest of the people who think the world should retard the progress of everything just because it means they might have to change the way they do things. Sue every fresh faced kid? KISS survived during those years when things were kind of lean and they had stopped wearing makeup in part because of ‘piracy’. The fans who were trading and selling videos & recordings of their shows at the KISS-Fests helped keep the band in the minds of fans and really helped create the market for the group to return to the old style makeup shows & have a huge comeback. He and the rest of the band owe a debt to the people who kept that stuff out there for people to find on the internet. Without it, he’s got nothing close to the ‘career’ he’s got going on right now. The rest of the band probably owe those fans that Gene wants to sue out of existence even MORE because they didn’t even have the minor acting careers that Gene had managed to eke out. People like Simmons are just so completely clueless that they really tick me off. They would rather lock everything up in a vault for nobody to hear or see & then complain because nobody knows who they are. They just don’t understand that by making what they’ve already done readily available that they’re creating a stronger market for new material. Every study has shown that the people who do the most downloading of music & other entertainment from the internet are also the ones who spend the money on actual product – the produced CD’s & DVD’s, associated materials, etc. These people they want to sue are some of the ones giving them the most money but people like Simmons are too lazy to try and figure out ways to make money from the new forms of media and the people who use them. Like the MPAA & RIAA, they think the public should ignore any advances in entertainment distribution, to the point of throwing people in jail. Then those same studios / labels have gone on to eventually make enormous amounts of money from the very thing they spent so much time & money trying to suppress. The truly stupid thing is that these groups & people NEVER seem to learn because the next one that comes along they behave just as ignorant as they did the last time.
    Sorry, this is a subject that just really, really p***es me off.

Leave a Reply to akaKJB Cancel Reply

Email (will not be published)