Matt Brian reports:
As we reported earlier, it appeared that the Gawker Media organization’s social media accounts (namely Twitter) had been compromised. While Twitter specifically appears to have been fixed, there’s more to the story. We have been in touch, personally, with the a member of the party responsible for the attack and it appears that the compromised information goes far beyond just a simple Twitter account.
From the information we have been provided, it appears that some of the base infrastructure of the Gawker Media organization has landed in the hands of people completely unrelated to the site or business itself. Though we were initially under the impression that it was the 4chan-founded group of Anonymous we have since been told, via email, that the responsible party has no affiliation with Anonymous or others.
Read more on TheNextWeb.
Update: It gets worse and worse for Gawker. TheNextWeb now reports:
Gawker Media is under siege at the moment, fighting off attacks from a group of attackers that have been able to compromise the entire database of Gawker Media’s web properties, exposing sensitive information including staff conversations, their private passwords used within the network and passwords also used by people who have registered to comment.
All of the above information has been outputted into a 500MB torrent file, currently residing on the popular torrent tracker ThePirateBay.
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.