Ukrainian hackers vs Travis Yost

Ukrainian hackers vs Travis Yost refers to the hacking and subsequent deletion of a series of articles reporting on a criticizing Eugene Melnyk's financial management and situation written by sports journalist Travis Yost between June and August 2013, the same summer Daniel Alfredsson chose to leave Ottawa for Detroit, which is rumored to be the result of a financial disagreement with the Senators. The articles were posted on hockeybuzz.com. These articles includes "Gene Melnyk Money I-VII", and "Why Can't the Ottawa Senators Afford Anything". The articles have not been republished.

Between June and August of 2013, Travis Yost wrote eight separate articles detailing Senators owner Eugene Melnyk's alleged cumbersome financial situation. The articles claimed that an anonymous "high ranking" source within the NHL had confirmed that the there had been a growing concern within the NHL administration regarding the Ottawa Senators financial state of affairs. The anonymous source also alleged that the Senators had been place on some sort of "watch list", presumably for teams not making enough money to satisfy league officials.

Melnyk denied these allegations, calling the article "B.S.", and Travis Yost a "useless blogger", as well as "kind of annoying".

Six days after the final article was posted onto hockeybuzz.com, the Ottawa Citizen posted an in-depth report looking into the Ottawa Senator's financial performance under Eugene Melnyk, and concluded that the Senators had lost around 94 million dollars under the Melnyk ownership.

The Hacking
On August 25th, 2013 in the early morning, hockeybuzz.com was hacked, and every article written by Yost between January 2012 and August 2013 had been erased from the site. Travis Yost posted this update the same day.

The IP address was traced back to a network in Kiev, Ukraine. Furthermore, the IP address was associated with the website "aliveview.com.ua", a domain related to the charity Help Us Help the Children. Eugene Melnyk was listed as the "honorary director" of the charity. Eugene Melnyk is of Ukrainian descent, and has mentioned Ukraine on social media just weeks before the incident.

#FreeYost was briefly tended on twitter following the incident going public.

This is all speculation. It has never been proved that Euegene Melnyk was behind the Travis Yost hacking.