“All of the above information has been outputted by Gnosis, a group who wanted to seemingly put Gawker back in its place, creating a 500MB torrent file, currently residing on the popular torrent tracker ThePirateBay,” Brian reports. “Inside the torrent file lies a file entitled Readme.txt. This file is potentially the most sensitive of them all, for it holds the usernames and passwords used by the entire Gawker staff, focusing particularly on Gawker’s founder Nick Denton. The usernames and passwords to Denton’s Google Apps, Twitter, Campfire accounts are all listed; Denton uses the same password for them all.”
Brian reports, “If you’re worried about whether your Gawker user password has been compromised or not, the company’s Lifehacker blog has published a FAQ on the issue. Essentially, if you logged in to comment on Gawker, Gizmodo, Jalopnik, Jezebel, Kotaku, Lifehacker, Deadspin, io9, or Fleshbot you need to change the password for both your Gawker account and anywhere else you use that password.”
Full article here.
Kashmir Hill reports for Forbes, “In addition to being an embarrassing breach of security, given that many of Gawker’s scoops come from anonymous sources, this attack could lead to some uncomfortable — and possibly litigation-inspiring — unmaskings. ‘We went after Gawker because of their outright arrogance,’ a member of Gnosis tells Mediaite. ‘We have had access to all of their emails for a long time as well as most of their infrastructure powering the site.'”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Karma.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “KenC” for the heads up.]