(WIRED) -- Gawker Media, the blog powerhouse built by Nick Denton, has been hacked.
After bringing the company's websites to a standstill Sunday, one or more hackers operating under the name Gnosis released a 500 MB file apparently containing Gawker's source code, commenter and staff passwords, and internal conversations between the company's employees.
The email addresses and passwords of hundreds of thousands of Gawker users have been compromised, the hackers said.
It's the worst security breach in New York-based Gawker's eight-year history, and a wake-up call to all web publishers.
"We're deeply embarrassed by this breach," Gawker said in a blog post Sunday afternoon.
The attack included Gawker's eponymous flagship property, as well as gadget site Gizmodo and the culture site Jezebel.
The successful Gawker hack followed a week of escalating attacks in the wake of Wikileaks's continued release of U.S. State Dept. documents and counter-attacks by hackers associated with group known as Anonymous, which has staged a campaign called Operation Payback.
Over the last year, Gawker has been covering, with its trademark disdain, the antics of the 4Chan message board, leading 4Chan users to attack the site with denial-of-service attacks in July. CNN
