Hackers launched a distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attack that sporadically downed popular blog network Gawker Media over the weekend and on Monday, the company confirmed in a blog post early Tuesday morning.
When CNET News spoke to Gawker Media representatives on Monday, they were not yet sure what was causing the outages but had not ruled out malicious behavior.
The attacks appear to have been launched at Consumerist, a blog that Gawker sold to Consumer Reports last year but which is still hosted on the same servers. The motivation behind them is not yet clear.
The New York-based Gawker Media has sold or merged a number of its blog titles over the past few years, but it remains the parent company of several extremely high-profile blogs--often with an edgy gossip angle--like Gizmodo, Jezebel, and the eponymous Gawker.com.
DDOS attacks occur when hackers swamp a site with excess pings from multiple sources to bring it down; they can knock out entire hosting companies.
Twitpic is a program that lets Twitter users share photos, but it is not owned by Twitter.
(Credit: Twitpic)
It seemed like celebrity deaths were contagious last week. After the sad news about Michael Jackson, Farrah Fawcett, and Ed McMahon dying, a wave of viral death notices went out on Twitter for Britney Spears, Ellen DeGeneres, Jeff Goldblum, and P. Diddy. But all are safe and sound.
"Britney has passed today," the bogus tweet announced on Sunday. "It is a sad day for everyone. More news to come."
The message was immediately taken down and Spears' staff tweeted that her account was hacked into and that, "She is fine and dandy spending a quiet day at home relaxing."
Similar messages were put up on the other celebrities' accounts, says Mashable, a social-media news site. They believe hackers got access to these celebrities' Twitter accounts through Twitpic, a program that lets Twitter users share photos but is not owned by Twitter. To post to Twitpic, users can e-mail a photo with a subject line, put in their PIN, and the post will be immediately tweeted.
According to The Associated Press, once discovered, the morbid tweets were taken down and Twitpic temporarily shutoff part of its service, announcing they were "implementing a fix immediately."
Twitpic fixed this vulnerability by Monday and in an apology letter explained that the hackers tried every PIN combination possible until one worked. Now, Twitpic says a "fix has been put in place to prevent this from happening," and that less than 10 users were affected by the hack and "no account information was compromised."
This isn't the first time Spears' Twitter account has been toyed with. At the end of April, a hacker got access to a Twitter administrator password by guessing the secret question to reset the password and broke into Spears' and other celebrities' accounts.
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