The gruesome aftermath of last weekend’s ugly hacker attack on gossip empire Gawker Media has other sites working furiously to ensure their users are kept out of harm’s way.
Several sites, including fashion forum Gilt Group, Blizzard Entertainment’s “World of Warcraft” and Yahoo!, are advising some users, who are also among the estimated 1.3 million registered users of Gawker, to reset their passwords to guard against possible identity theft.
Career networking site LinkedIn went so far as to disable some accounts and then e-mail those users, telling them to reset their passwords.
“We’ve identified a very small fraction of our members whose accounts could potentially be affected by the recent breach [of Gawker Media],” LinkedIn said on its blog yesterday.
“To help minimize the effects of this compromise — namely for players who might be using the same login information for their Gawker Media accounts and their Battle.net accounts — we issued password-reset e-mails for several accounts,” Battle.net said.
Social networking phenomenon Facebook said it “checked data from the Gawker incident against accounts on Facebook and [is] in the process of remediating all accounts that may have been impacted.”
In other words, access to affected accounts will be blocked and users will have to verify their identities to get in, said a spokeswoman.
Over the weekend, a group calling itself Gnosis hacked into Gawker Media’s various sites, including Gawker.com, obtained user names, passwords and e-mail addresses of 1.3 million users and published an online list of 100,000 users. The list includes e-mail addresses from such places as Condé Nast, The New York Times and government organizations like NASA.
Several hacked Twitter accounts were co-opted and used to send spam.
The red-faced Gawker, run by controversial founder Nick Denton, posted its own fuzzy message yesterday, walking users through the process of resetting their passwords.
“Here’s how it works: Click the big Reset Password button below,” the message said.