Pictures from the wreckage: Gawker attacked by spiteful hackers

Tired of Gawker's condescension toward their people, some resentful hackers spent their Sunday mounting an attack that basically sent the message, "All your base are belong to us."

A group known as Gnosis hacked Gawker yesterday and obtained access to the accounts of most of the site's admin, editors, and users (yes, that's you!). This means that they have the e-mail addresses and passwords of 1.5 million people who either obviously (Gawker employees) or almost definitely (Gawker users) use the internet, like, all the time. Oh, and the hackers released all of it in a torrent that was made available via Gawker's own homepage. That post has since been taken down, but the torrent is still out there for the plundering.

So in other words: change the fuck out of all your online passwords, people with Gawker accounts — especially the 2,650 of you whose passwords are, yes, "password."

The attack was clearly a huge middle finger to Gawker. But what prompted it? The site's "outright arrogance," says the guy claiming to represent Gnosis. Gawker's been known to shit on hackers/the 4chan community every thrice in a while. So Gnosis, which claims to be neither 4chan nor the 4chan-spawned hacker group Anonymous, went ahead and did this:

The lines toward the bottom are from a group chat between Gawker's writers, who no longer have access to publish on their own site. 

This story is a complex one, and it's easier to tell with images. Here's the homepage after it was hacked. The top post is the fake one from the hackers and leads to the torrent.

This is the 'derp' picture they put in the post.

Here's a Gawker chat log that especially pissed off the hackers (in an earlier chat, Richard Lawson "demoted" 4chan to 3chan, in case you get confused):

(They were wrong, of course — their accounts were very much included in the leak.) Here's a tweet that one of the hackers published from the Twitter account of Gawker-owned Gizmodo:

That pretty much sums up the blogging world's version of WikiLeaks, which Twitter is already calling GawkerLeaks or something. Basically, all of our lives have officially become science fiction. 

On a related note, please don't hack me.