Sex and the City Author Attacked by Pirate

It is every author’s worst nightmare and the embodiment of the industry’s worst fears.

On May 7th, a hacker calling himself Guccifer broke into Sex and the City author Candace Bushnell’s e-mail account and carried away a large portion of her unpublished novel, Killing Monica.  The manuscript had been attached to an outgoing message and sent to Bushnell’s publisher. And then things got worse. According to Techworld:

Extraordinarily, the hacker was also able to hack into the author’s Twitter account in order to post links to screengrabs of the book’s pages on a Google Drive repository before hijacking her website, making it a near clean sweep.

“Here you can read my last book ''killing monica'' first 50 pages; enjoy as long as you can!,” read the tweet on 7 May.

As though that weren’t bad enough, the attack continued:

Adding insult to injury, the attacker was also able to intercept between Bushnell and her agent as she tried to regain control of her Twitter account plus a number of private images and other personal messages.

“Oh dear this is terrible,” one of Bushnell’s emails reads.

This isn’t the first time Guccifer has struck. Techworld reports that he previous hacked into the e-mail accounts of friends and relatives of both former Presidents Bush, then leaking snippets of electronic conversations. Another time, he broke into the Facebook account of former US Secretary of State, Colin Powell.

“Since then,” says Techworld, “Guccifer has also reportedly attacked email accounts belonging to various high-profile individuals. That seems to be the logic; embarrass the wealthy and powerful.”