Gawker.com struggled to remain on the internet earlier this week as a result of a DDoS attack. The attack was aimed at Consumerist.com, a site hosted by Gawker, but other parts of the Gawker online empire suffered under the barrage. Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks are often used by hackers who have a vendetta against a particular organisation, such as Gawker, or a hacker who has an interest in targeting a particular website or a particular group.”]
Source: https://grahamcluley.com/gawker-blog-network-suffers-denialofservice-attack/