Gawker dusts itself off after DDoS attack

For much of last night and earlier today, most of Gawker Media’s properties were experiencing intermittent downtime, which is highly unusual for them.

All properties seem to be back up and running at their peak as I write this, so all is well again, but what caused the downtime in the first place? A property that Gawker sold last year was hacked.

The high profile consumer watchdog blog, Consumerist, purchased by the Consumers Union in 2008, was hacked and since it is apparently still hosted on the same servers as current Gawker sites, the hackage damage cascaded across other Gawker properties as well.

From Gawker:

Well here’s your last (Hopefully!) technical difficulties update: According to a memo sent out tonight by our IT team, the recent Gawker Media server problems were the result of a DDOS attack against Consumerist.

Quick thought – It may be time for Gawker to cut the umbilical cord with Consumerist, on the tech end of things at least.