Podcaster Falls Prey to RSS Hijacking

[mandy]

Once a hijacker has diverted the target podcaster's RSS feed, he or she can wait until a convenient moment when the victim's audience has grown sufficiently and then demand payment. The podcaster is vulnerable because the hijacker can divert the URL pointer to any other podcast and the podcaster's audience will disappear

Extortionists now have a new type of victim to pick on: podcasters. U.S. podcaster Eric Marcus has fallen prey to a hijacker who has diverted his really simple syndication (RSS) feed and is allegedly demanding money to release it. Marcus, who runs the Vegan.com site...

full article: http://www.toptechnews.com/story.xhtml?s...3000002K9R

[misteroriginal]

Will the scamming never end!!!

Diverting RSS feeds is standard. I was planning to do this and hoping others would do the same for me, sort of like exchanging links. It sounds like the "bad guy" built a better website that attracted more attention to the podcast. People preferred going to the better-built site, as people tend to do. Am I misreading this?

[mandy]

This is from the hijacked podcaster (PDF format): http://vegan.com/issues/2005/podjacking.pdf

[misteroriginal]

[quote author=mandy link=topic=1547.msg7519#msg7519 date=1137069373]
This is from the hijacked podcaster (PDF format): http://vegan.com/issues/2005/podjacking.pdf
[/quote]

I feel for the guy, but it looks like it was at LEAST partially his own fault.