Gawker Media websites hacked

[onehandle]

Source: CNN

After bringing the company's websites to a standstill Sunday, one or more hackers operating under the name Gnosis released a 500 MB file apparently containing Gawker's source code, commenter and staff passwords, and internal conversations between the company's employees. The email addresses and passwords of hundreds of thousands of Gawker users have been compromised, the hackers said.

It's the worst security breach in New York-based Gawker's eight-year history, and a wake-up call to all web publishers. "We're deeply embarrassed by this breach," Gawker said in a blog post Sunday afternoon. The attack included Gawker's eponymous flagship property, as well as gadget site Gizmodo and the culture site Jezebel.

The successful Gawker hack followed a week of escalating attacks in the wake of Wikileaks's continued release of U.S. State Dept. documents and counter-attacks by hackers associated with group known as Anonymous, which has staged a campaign called Operation Payback. Over the last year, Gawker has been covering, with its trademark disdain, the antics of the 4Chan message board, leading 4Chan users to attack the site with denial-of-service attacks in July.

That's the same tactic being used against Visa.com, Paypal.com and Mastercard.com for those companies' decisions to cut-off the ability to donate to Wikileaks. But the latest attack is much more serious than a typical denial-of-service attack. Gawker's attackers managed to infiltrate the company's content management system (CMS), user database, and internal communications system. The hackers then published a raw file containing that information.

Read more: http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/web/12/13/gawker.hacked.wired/index.html

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Hilarious. The Gawker people are largely asses and had this coming.

That being said, if you have any logins at any of their sites, change your password now. Especially if you have any personal emails or real names associated with your account. And if your passwords have any words/numbers even close to other passwords, I'd change those too. Hell, I'd just delete the account, and move on. No big loss. It's Gawker.

Passwords should be a minimum of 15 characters, numbers and letters - totally random. Use a randomizer. I highly recommend '1Password.' http://agilewebsolutions.com/onepassword

[flvegan]

1. jalopnik.com had all kinds of problems

I love that site.

[Name removed]

2. Deleted message

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