The domain HijackThis.com was registered in September 2001, several days after the September 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center in New York City. The initial plan was to put up a website and post – I didn’t know what, exactly – but it’s probably best that I didn’t follow through with any of the initial ideas.

In early 2004 I started receiving offers to buy the domain name hijackthis.com. I did a little research to find out why the domain had suddenly become valuable and learned of a very cool free program called hijackthis.exe that had been developed by a Dutch college student, Merijn Bellekom. Having learned that Merijn freely gave this and other programs away to those in need I didn’t feel right about trying to sell the domain to him, or anyone else for that matter, especially considering that my further research and communications with some of the interested buyers revealed that certain of them were the bad guys. They wanted to create HijackThis.com as a lair to dupe visitors into downloading malware!

I tried several times to contact Merijn by email to offer to give the domain to him at no charge, but did not receive a reply (I learned later that a lot of Merijn’s email had been lost and he most likely never saw mine). I still have one of those emails and may post it here. HIjackThis.exe was sold to TrendMicro in March of 2007 and is still available free of charge.

HijackThis.com, the website, was created to provide resources for our visitors to take back control of their computers.