Gawker Hack Stirs ID Safety Precautions

The aftermath of last weekend's hacker attack on gossip empire Gawker Media prompted other sites to work furiously to ensure their users were kept out of harm's way, the New York Post reported Thursday.

Several sites -- including fashion forum Gilt Group, Blizzard Entertainment's "World of Warcraft" and Yahoo! -- were advising their 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 email 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]," LinkedIn said on its blog Wednesday.

Battle.net also issued a warning to its users, saying, "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 emails for several accounts."

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." 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 various Gawker Media sites, including Gawker.com, to obtain user names, passwords and email addresses of 1.3 million users and then published an online list of 100,000 of them.

The list includes email addresses from such places as Conde Nast, The New York Times and government organizations like NASA.