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Comment by ccnafr | Hacker News Reader

This is clickbait... yes, clickbait on BBC

The guy was a ransomware distributor who used malvertising campaigns to hijack traffic from all sort of sites, not just porn sites.

NCA press release: https://nationalcrimeagency.gov.uk/news/hacker-from-russian-...

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I'm confused. The press release says Qaiser "bought masses of advertising traffic from pornographic websites" -- so what's wrong with the BBC's reporting, here?

I went through the article. I'm not seeing exactly how this is clickbait, or as some other comments that are strangely claiming, buzzfeed-like. Are we missing something here?

Emphasizing porn users and blackmail implies that the hacker blackmailed porn users by threatening to expose their usage (like what kind of porn they watch or somwthing).

The correct title is guy got jailed for infecting computers with ransomware through regular ads. This is something that happens weekly I would assume, and is barely newsworthy.

The BBC reported though, that he claimed to have captured video of the victim which, to me, sounds like exposing their usage of porn in a very personal way. Comparing this headline to buzzfeed is not justified imho.

It's been a while since bbc shed any notion of journalistic reputability. Now their news page is as vacuous and turpid as the next. That said there is still quality reporting being done, especially in the longform articles.

Some of the nature reporting (non-climate-change related) is also good and seems to have people who genuinely care about their area.

But yes, mostly the BBC news output has become trash now. Technology/politics seems especially bad.

It's actually been more than a few years now that www.bbc.com has been full of click bait. Scroll down to the "Editor Picks" and it's not very different from what you would see on something like Mashable.

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