Techcrunch down; Apple tablet hype hack?

Last night, a major tech blog was hacked. While you were sleeping, TechCrunch was dead to the world. In IT Blogwatch, bloggers wonder if it's connected to Apple's announcements tomorrow, pointing fingers at Rackspace security.

By Richi Jennings. January 26, 2010.
[Updated 7.25am EST: add tweets from @arrington]

Your humble blogwatcher selected these bloggy morsels for your enjoyment. Not to mention Happy Australia Day...
 
 
Aunty Beeb offers this sober, Reithian reportage:

High-profile technology blog TechCrunch has been taken offline by hackers. ... The site went down at around 0620 GMT [1.20am EST] and was replaced by various messages including a link to a site directing people towards adult material.
...
TechCrunch was founded by entrepreneur Michael Arrington and profiles Silicon Valley start-ups and technology firms across the US. ... Apple is expected to make an announcement about a new product on Wednesday - possibly a tablet computer - which TechCrunch will closely follow.

Whereas John Leyden... not so much:

Techchrunch was hit by potty-mouth hackers on Tuesday. ... Hackers defaced the front page of the site with a message ... apparently abusing site admins and including a link to a pornographic website.
...
The motives or perpetrators of the attack remain unclear but the timing - a day before Apple's much anticipated iTab launch in San Francisco - could hardly be worse.

Duncan Riley rails at Rackspace:

The hacking seems to have affected the main TechCrunch.com domain only, with subdomains still online. ... The new hacking comes as some have recently reported security issues with Rackspace, the host of TechCrunch, Mashable, and range of other sites.

Zee M. Kane agrees, noting that TC has form:

The blog has experienced frequent downtime of late but as have other blogs who host on Rackspace including, Mashable and The Inquisitr – we fortunately aren’t (we’re with Slicehost, owned by Rackspace interestingly enough).
...
The irony here of course, as it would be for us, is TechCrunch is a reliable source for information on site downtime.

TechCrunch's MG Siegler tweets, forlornly:

Yes, TechCrunch is having some issues. Yes, we're working on it.
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TechCrunch is coming back online shortly. Thanks for the zillions of messages/tweets/bat signals :)
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okay well i give up. guess i'll just post **** to my personal site for the foreseeable future.

But Graham Cluley has reasons to be cheerful (1, 2, 3):

As far as we can tell at this point, the site was not infected with malware. If that is confirmed then we should all be grateful.
...
There's no such time as a 'good time' to be hacked of course, but one can only imagine that today is a better day for TechCrunch to be hacked than tomorrow. That's when the site will be expecting a large amount of traffic as millions of people around the world look for information about the new iSlate/iPad/iTablet/iDontKnowWhatItWillBeCalled  due to be announced by Apple.

Once the dust had settled, Michael Arrington expostulated thuswise:

china totally hacked us. maybe.
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ok it wasn't the Chinese. It was the Canadians.

So what's your take?
Get involved: leave a comment.
 
 
And finally...

• How Australians rule the world
  [hat tip: Ciaran Duffy]

 

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Richi Jennings is an independent analyst/consultant, specializing in blogging, email, and security. A cross-functional IT geek since 1985, he is also an analyst at Ferris Research. You can follow him as @richi on Twitter, or richij on FriendFeed, pretend to be richij's friend on Facebook, or just use good old email: itblogwatch@richij.com.

 
 
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