Man Arrested for Attack on Gene Simmons' Website

Gene Simmons arrives at the VH1 Do Something Awards at the Hollywood Palladium.

Kevin Mazur/WireImage

A man accused of being a part of the hacking group Anonymous was arrested yesterday on charges of attacking the website of Kiss rocker Gene Simmons. Kevin George Poe, 24, is accused of using a computer program to bombard GeneSimmons.com with tens of thousands of requests in a denial of service attack in October 2010. Poe was arrested in Connecticut on charges of conspiracy and unauthorized impairment of a protected computer. He faces up to 15 years in prison if convicted.

Photos: Random Notes

Authorities have not indicated why Poe, and by extension the Anonymous collective, targeted Simmons and his website. Anonymous has previously been associated with attacks on the websites of Playstation, MasterCard, Visa and the Church of Scientology.

• 
  MUSIC Exclusive Live Chat With Linkin Park and Incubus
• 
  MOVIES & TV Peter Travers: 'The Avengers' Has it All
• 
  POLITICS Matt Taibbi: Jon Corzine Is the Original Zimmerman
• 
  VIDEOS Exclusive Premiere: Tenacious D's 'Tinnitus'

Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

More Song Stories entries »

Twitter