Gawker Media, the celebrity and political blog powerhouse, and it’s ring of blogs, including Twitter, were hacked this weekend by a group of hackers operating the under the name of Gnosis.Gawker said it was deeply embarrassed over the hack, in which Gnosis released a 500 MB file containing Gawker’s source code, internal conversations between the companies employees, and email addresses and passwords of commentators, banks, federal government employees and NASA.
"This weekend we discovered that Gawker Media's servers were compromised, resulting in a security breach at Lifehacker, Gizmodo, Gawker, Jezebel, io9, Jalopnik, Kotaku, Deadspin and Fleshbot,” Gawker wrote in a post on its Lifehacker blog. "We understand how important trust is on the Internet, and we're deeply sorry for and embarrassed about this breach of security -- and of trust. We're working around-the-clock to ensure our security (and our commenters' account security) moving forward," Gawker added.
The successful hack followed a week of escalating attacks against Wikileaks for releasing U.S. State Dept. cables as well as counter-attacks by hackers associated with a group known as Anonymous in a campaign called Operation Payback.
The hackers brought the Gawker site to a standstill on Sunday with a denial-of-service attack, identical to the tactic being used against Visa.com, Paypal.com and Mastercard.com for those companies’ decisions to stop the ability to donate to Wikileaks.
Gawker has since regained control of their servers, and is telling readers to change their passwords.An anonymous source identifying itself as one of the Gnosis hackers told news blog Mediaite that Gawker was attacked because it’s arrogance, and wrote in the leaked file: "Your empire has been compromised, Your servers, Your database's, Online accounts and source code have all be ripped to shreds!.. You would think a site that likes to mock people, such as gawker, would have better security and actually have a clue what they are doing. But as we've proven, those who think they are beyond our reach aren't as safe as they would like to think!"
"This weekend we discovered that Gawker Media's servers were compromised, resulting in a security breach at Lifehacker, Gizmodo, Gawker, Jezebel, io9, Jalopnik, Kotaku, Deadspin and Fleshbot,” Gawker wrote in a post on its Lifehacker blog. "We understand how important trust is on the Internet, and we're deeply sorry for and embarrassed about this breach of security -- and of trust. We're working around-the-clock to ensure our security (and our commenters' account security) moving forward," Gawker added.
The successful hack followed a week of escalating attacks against Wikileaks for releasing U.S. State Dept. cables as well as counter-attacks by hackers associated with a group known as Anonymous in a campaign called Operation Payback.
The hackers brought the Gawker site to a standstill on Sunday with a denial-of-service attack, identical to the tactic being used against Visa.com, Paypal.com and Mastercard.com for those companies’ decisions to stop the ability to donate to Wikileaks.
Gawker has since regained control of their servers, and is telling readers to change their passwords.An anonymous source identifying itself as one of the Gnosis hackers told news blog Mediaite that Gawker was attacked because it’s arrogance, and wrote in the leaked file: "Your empire has been compromised, Your servers, Your database's, Online accounts and source code have all be ripped to shreds!.. You would think a site that likes to mock people, such as gawker, would have better security and actually have a clue what they are doing. But as we've proven, those who think they are beyond our reach aren't as safe as they would like to think!"
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