Gawker hack is bad news for us all

[Renew Deal]

A lot of people are gawking at Gawker Media this morning, though not for reasons that will bring much cheer to its founder, Nick Denton.

Gawker, parent to popular blogs as Gizmodo, Lifehacker, Jezebel, and ValleyWag, was caught with its pants down around its ankles while wearing clown makeup after a hacker group calling itself Gnosis took over the site.

Among other things, Gnosis took Gawker's souce code and posted it on torrent sites, hacked into Gawker's content management system, and posted a bogus story on the Gawker home page linking back to the source code torrents. That was just for starters. The group also broke into the site's database, gaining access to email addresses and passwords for all of Gawker's staffers and more than 1 million readers who'd registered with the site. These too found their way onto pirate torrent sites, free for the download.

Why is Gnosis picking on Gawker? Because it thought Gawker was picking on 4chan, the group of digital delinquents that spawned the vigilante group Anonymous, as well as most of the Internet memes that have annoyed people for the last decade, such as lolcatz and Rickrolling.
<snip>

http://www.infoworld.com/d/adventures-in-it/gawker-hack-bad-news-us-all-264

[IADEMO2004]

1. Years ago a " Internet Security Expert" said His important info

is on a computer that is never connected to the internet.