Pierce Mattie Public Relations New York

In a week of website hacking, from Visa to MasterCard and even SarahPalin.com, it appears that Operation Payback has been just the inspiration hackers needed to motivate them to take down more sites. This time Gawker and it's properties, Gidmodo and Jezebel. Although not related to Operation Payback, you could say that exposing the media site's source code, email addresses and passwords of past and present employees as well as the same for it's registered users, was indeed retaliation.

A group that calls themselves Gnosis, not only hacked the site and made all private details open for all to see, it spawned the data mined from registered accounts to be used to distribute spam throughout Twitter.  Although it is uncertain if it was Gnosis that began the spam attack, it's definitely clear that their exposure of the usernames and passwords prompted it. Spam tweets about Acai began flooding Twitter streams reinforcing the fact that you should not use the same username and password for all of your accounts. 

In general, this brings about more concern than just the exploitation of Gawker, but an increased awareness that there is no such thing as privacy and security on the interwebs (see my related post "Has Social Media Changed Our View on Privacy?"). What do you think?

Photo: Sourced from Jon Erickson's Hacking: The Art of Exploitation