Venture capitalists fall prey to porno hack

SAN FRANCISCO BASED Blueprint Ventures - a venture capitalist backer of companies like KeyEye Communications and Visto (not Vista) lost its web page to a hacker over the weekend.

The hacker forwarded allcomers to the page to filthy, filthy prawnography sites, and demanded a ransom to undo the changes made. Blueprint is struggling with domain name maestro Register.com to get the site back to normal. There's definitely hacking afoot, it would seem - Bart Schachter of Blueprint told Red Herring that registration fees were all paid.

Blueprint's domain now lists one Andrew Krukov from Moscow as the owner, though the email address linked leads directly to a domain registered in the name of Andy Placid who owns sites including treffend.com, an infamous prawnography spamming source.

Apparently, the process of fixing up the site is abysmally lengthy. Bill reckons that it's going to take weeks, which he says is absurd. "It's like someone stealing a car, and you're pointing to it, you have the papers, but they won't give it back to you." Bill said.

Not only is the recovery process troublesome, but the steal has really screwed with the Blueprint schedule, Bill said. "It's messed with the closing schedule - but the real handicap is to go without email," the miffed fella said. For now, though, there's a temporary site for all things Blueprint Venture at Blueprintventure.com. µ