Hackers seem to be enjoying their 15 minutes of anonymous fame.
Rolling Stone gives Wikileaks hacker Jacob Appelbaum the rock star treatment, and Gawker’s publishing platform was hacked, its user database and source code published and a few Twitter accounts were temporarily hijacked.
Mediaite published an email interview with someone claiming to represent Gnosis, the hacker group that claims responsibility for the attack, who say it’s not over yet: “They didn’t like their frontpage being defaced with that post, so they have locked down pretty tight. We will still work on it for a while.”
Then good guy hackers rose to defend the innocent Gawker users whose passwords had been published.
Hackers had hit PayPal, MasterCard and Visa last week with denial of service attacks attempting to make the sites inaccessible due to a flood of traffic. The attacks were a retaliation because those companies stopped supporting payments to Wikileaks.
So there was speculation that hackers had struck again when Amazon.com was down in a few European countries late Sunday. Amazon pulled hosting for Wikileaks, saying the organization violated its terms of service. But the company said this morning the downtime was due to a hardware failure.
Meanwhile, Fast Company predicts we haven’t heard the last of hacktivism and we agree. If you seek fame, glory and possibly prison time, it’s a great field to get into.
ajeffries [at] observer.com | @adrjeffries
