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A group of hackers has infiltrated Nick Denton's Gawker Media empire in what some are calling the most damaging cyber security breach of a media company to date. The usernames, emails and passwords of up to 1.3 million registered users were published to the web over the weekend. The blogs under the Gawker Media umbrella include Gizmodo, Deadspin, Kotaku, Jezebel, i09, Jalopnik, Lifehacker and Fleshbot. A group named "Gnosis" is taking responsibility for attack, telling Mediaite: "We went after Gawker because of their outright arrogance." Many suspect this in reference to the cyber attacks waged against Gawker in July, in which Gawker taunted hackers at 4Chan.org and flaunted its ability to withstand DDOS attacks.

The hacker group also sent a message to Gawker:

Your empire has been compromised, Your servers, Your database's, Online accounts and source code have all be ripped to shreds! You wanted attention, well guess what, You've got it now!



In a post published yesterday to readers, the Gawker staff wrote: "We're deeply embarrassed by this breach. We should not be in the position of relying on the goodwill of the hackers who identified the weakness in our systems." Here's what other bloggers are saying about the attack and why it's so devastating for Gawker: