Political News Website Brought Down After Hacker Story
Talking Points Memo publishes mug shots of reported Anonymous hackers, and soon after is hacked.
| Posted Saturday, Sept. 10, 2011, at 1:58 PM
Political news website Talking Points Memo ran 14 mugshots of alleged members of hacker group Anonymous on Friday, and subsequently was brought down by a hacker attack.
Coincidence? We think not.
Site editor Josh Marshall writes:
“As some of you may have noticed, TPM was offline and inaccessible for roughly 8 hours starting just before 5 PM on the East Coast this evening. The site was the victim of a massive denial of service (DDOS) attack. ”
While says TPM has no direct evidence that hactavist group Anonymous was behind the attack, Marshall notes the site has never suffered a similar attack in it’s 11 years of being online, and that DDOS attacks are the signature move of Anonymous. While the site was down, editors set up a Tumblr blog to run updates and other content that would usually live on their regular website.
The 14 alleged hackers, whose mugshots were obtained by TPM through a Freedom of Information Act request, are mostly accused of being part of hacking attack on PayPal after the company disabled Wikileaks’ account.
Peter Jamison, of SF Weekley, points out the irony of a hacker group who published photos of genitalia belonging to a BART spokesman getting mad over a website publishing photos of people charged with a crime.
