14 DAY TRIAL // Dr Brooke Magnanti and Zoe Margolis two female authors who used to write popular risque blogs and books under pseudonyms claim that journalists from the Sunday Times tried to out them by using malware.
"From what I'm now hearing about the Sunday Times, it's making me wonder if I should contact the Met; never did learn how they outed me...," wrote Zoe Margolis, author of the "Girl with a One Track Mind" blog and book on Twitter.
"They tried a trojan in email to me in 2005. I would not be surprised if they used similar tactics on you," Dr Brooke Magnanti, author of Diary of a London Call Girl tweeted back.
"Christ. I do recall an attachment (that I was unable to open) that was initially sent to me by the journo... Grr!" Margolis replied.
For a long time, Zoe Margolis, a former freelance camera assistant, was only known online as Abby Lee, the protagonist of her risque stories about a girl obsessed with men and her encounters with them.
Margolis' rise to popularity made people curious about her real identity, a secret which she made significant efforts to keep. Journalists from the Sunday Times eventually outted her in August 2006.
Dr Brooke Magnanti also published her work anonymously, until her identity was revealed in a Sunday Times interview in November 2009.
In a newly published blog post she tells the story of how she was on a public library computer in Clearwater, Florida, in 2005 and checked an email received from a journo at the Sunday Times.
"There was an attachment. The attachment started downloading automatically (then if I remember correctly, came up with a "failed to download" message). "My heart sank - my suspicion was that there had been a program attached to the message, some sort of trojan, presumably trying to get information from my computer," Magnanti writes.
Later she was told by her email administrator that a journalist from the Times called and asked him if Magnanti was really in Florida. At the time, everyone believed that Belle (Magnanti) was based in London.
These revelations come at a time when the News of the World was closed down because of its journalists hacked into people's voicemails to obtain stories. News of the World was owned by News Corporation, the same company that owns the Sunday Times.