Gawker Media Hacked

Do you comment at: Lifehacker, Gizmodo, Gawker, Jezebel, io9, Jalopnik, Kotaku, Deadspin, and/or Fleshbot?


If you do, your email and password are now in the cloud and compromised. Gawker Media was hacked and the group that did it has placed the list online. The passwords were encrypted (good) with a 10 year old, already beaten encryption. (bad)


Check here if you were compromised: http://www.slate.com/id/2277768/

Forbes has a good summary here: http://blogs.forbes.com/firewall/2010/12/13/the-lessons-of-gawkers-security-mess/
Looks like Gawker really dropped the ball and had a bunch of notices ahead of time they were compromised, and ignored it.


So far I've been lucky since I use a lot of different passwords. A lot. And remember them all. "Yo, my head hurts." (quote bonus points) However, I am now getting emails from various companies for password reset attempts, etc. Thanks Gawker, way to fail. It teaches us to always use different passwords at different websites though.


Ontop of that, Gawker Media won't delete your account from them. It's apparently in their terms of service. If you want to be done with them, you can, however, sign in and change your email WITHOUT them requiring the new/old email to be verified. If they add email verification, sign up for: http://10minutemail.com and point the address there.




So, if you commented on any of those sites, and don't use lots of different passwords, you need to make a list of every website you use anywhere on the internet and go change every single password out there. I'm debating doing this anyways... ugh. Talk about things I didn't want to deal while getting ready for vacation.