The Gawker Has Become the Gawkee

Gawker said Gnosis had claimed responsibility for the hack.

The hacker or hackers claimed they had been working on cracking Gawker's database for about 17 hours, according to a report on Mediaite.

Gnosis dumped a database with more than 1.3 million rows of data, source code information, an upcoming redesign of the Gawker site, a text file containing background information and passwords, and a list of Gawker server kernel versions.

These were then released on The Pirate Bay site.

The Pirate Bay is a Swedish website that indexes BitTorrent files. It has been battling the entertainment industry and people associated with the site have been charged with or convicted of aiding copyright infringement.

In an exchange of emails with Mediaite, Gnosis said it had retrieved 273,789 passwords and that tight deadlines prevented it from getting more than 500,000. The passwords included those linked to email accounts within organizations like NASA, banks and several government domains, Gnosis' emails said. It claimed to have had access to all Gawker's emails for a long time, and also to have access to most of the infrastructure powering Gawker's site.

Gnosis said Gawker's servers run outdated kernel versions, its site is filled with lots of exploitable code, and its database is publicly accessible.

The hacker or hackers said they wouldn't explain how they got into Gawker's servers because that information could be used against them. Gnosis said it isn't involved with 4Chan.

Hackers associated with the site 4Chan broke into Gawker's site in July, triggering a challenge from Gawker publisher Nick Denton and his staff. This apparently angered the people behind Gnosis, who launched their attack in retaliation.