[Infowarrior] - Gawker Shuts Down After Hackers

[Richard Forno]

December 12, 2010
Gawker Shuts Down After Hackers

By BRIAN STELTER

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/13/business/media/13gawker.html

Web sites belonging to Gawker Media abruptly stopped publishing on Sunday after mischief-making hackers gained access to the company’s servers.

People who had accounts on the flagship Gawker, Gizmodo, Jezebel and the company’s other Web sites were told to change their passwords because, it said in a statement, “our user databases appear to have been compromised.” Working anonymously, the hackers indicated that they had found more than 1.3 million user names and passwords, though it was unclear whether all of the data had been decrypted.

The hackers published the passwords of some Gawker staff members and mockingly identified thousands of users who had listed their password as “password.”

“We’re deeply embarrassed by this breach,” Gawker said in a statement that was posted across its suite of Web sites Sunday afternoon.

The incident was a black eye for Gawker, an eight-year-old digital media company founded by Nick Denton that has grown up in New York.

The company has long been a pioneer, setting and then resetting standards for blogging and online publishing, and of late it has been preparing a broad redesign of its Web sites.

Gawker’s Web sites run on a homegrown content management system, and some of the source code for that system was leaked by the hackers on Sunday. The hackers, who worked under the name “Gnosis,” published an article on Gawker that contained a link to the code.

Gawker Media became aware of the hacking attempt on Saturday, and staff scrambled to figure out how much virtual damage had been done. On Sunday afternoon, publishing came to a halt, apparently because the company was resetting the passwords for its dozens of writers and editors.

On Twitter, one of the bloggers for Jezebel wrote, “I’d write a post about how we’ve been hacked and can’t publish, but we’ve been hacked and can’t publish.”

The hackers suggested they had chosen Gawker out of spite. They said Gawker writers had been critical of the online message board 4chan, a chaotic group that mounts attacks on Web sites and individuals.

An affiliated group, Anonymous, gained attention last week for apparently taking down Web sites like MasterCard’s in a show of support for WikiLeaks, the organization that facilitated the release of secret State Department cables.

The Gawker hackers wrote in a document Sunday afternoon, “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!”

The hackers also seemed to want to impart a lesson about the user names and passwords that are a common part of business on the Web.

Before listing the accounts of thousands of people who used the word “password” as their password, the hackers wrote, “Maybe naming and shaming you all will encourge you all to use better passwords in the future? Probably not.”