Gawker has been under attack this weekend. Most have falsely lumped these attacks in with those from the Anonymous 4Chan group that went after the RIAA/MPAA and more recently defended WikiLeaks by going after sites like Paypal and Amazon. The group of hackers call themselves “Gnosis” and offered exclusive commentary to Mediaite as to the reason for these attacks. In short, Gnosis found that Gawker was saying things that they couldn’t let slide:
We went after Gawker because of their outright arrogance. It took us a few hours to find a way to dump all their source code and a bit longer to find a way into their database.
We found an interesting quote in their Campfire logs:
Hamilton N.: Nick Denton Says Bring It On 4Chan, Right to My Home Address (After
The Jump)Ryan T.: We Are Not Scared of 4chan Here at 210 Elizabeth St NY NY 10012
I mean if you say things like that, and attack sites like 4chan (Which we are not affiliated to) you must at least have the means to back yourself up. We considered what action we would take, and decided that the Gawkmedia “empire” needs to be brought down a peg or two. Our groups mission? We don’t have one.
The Gawker attacks and subsequent release of usernames and passwords has larger implications than just a blog network. It’s speculated that the recent Acai berry “worm” reported by Mashable is actually related to this attack. Those using the same login and password for Twitter that they use for Gawker sites like Lifehacker, may have been compromised. The Next Web details what data has been released by the hackers so far.