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An attack on online gossip site Gawker Media has enabled spammers to take over thousands of Twitter accounts. Gawker said on Sunday its servers had been hacked and 1.3 million user account passwords compromised.
A file containing those details was then published on a file-sharing site by a group allied to the notorious image board 4Chan. That enabled spammers to break into thousands of Twitter accounts where users had used the same passwords.
Gawker published a statement on its homepage advising its users to change their password after its servers were attacked. While the stored passwords were encrypted, "simple ones may be vulnerable to a brute force attack", it said.
A group calling itself "Gnosis" subsequently released a 500MB file containing the data taken from Gawker on the file-sharing system Bittorrent.
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