ECCC Website hacked. PvP and Goblins Websites also hacked. Is there a connection?

[Lord Nyax]

Yesterday the Emerald City Comic Con's website was hacked [http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2013/01/29/emerald-city-comicon-website-hacked] into. The hackers deleted everything, including the backups. The entire website needs to be rebuilt.

Now the webcomic Player vs. Player was also offline yesterday, and today features a blog post by author Scott Kurtz saying that the PvP website was hacked [http://www.pvponline.com/] into and completely deleted along with the "websites of some other very classy people". Kurtz says they'll have to rebuild the website completely, though he never mentions who these other classy people are.

The webcomic Goblins was also offline yesterday, and today is back up [http://goblinscomic.phantactics.de/] in a crude "interims page until the main site...is restored."

Does anyone know whats going on with this? Was this all done by the same person or persons? Why did they target ECCC and these webcomics? Has anyone noticed any other webcomics that may have been hacked? Dr.Mcninja, Giantitp, Sheldon, and many other popular webcomics seem to be just fine. Anyone have any info on this? I can't find any reporting about it other than the ECCC.

 

[Hero in a half shell]

Hmm, I wonder if this has anything to do with LookingForGroup's website going down (a Dungeon&Dragons inspired webcomic).
I tried to log onto it either yesterday or the day before, and it redirects to a facebook page.

I didn't think anything of it back then, but it could also be a victim here.

 

[DoPo]

Hmm, I wonder if this has anything to do with LookingForGroup's website going down (a Dungeon&Dragons inspired webcomic).

Erm, I thought it was quite clear LFG was inspired by WoW. Cale is a blood elf, who travels with undead warlock, an orc priest and for a while a tauren...dunno what (warrior?). Also, the name is a direct shout out to MMO lingo not present in D&D.

I tried to log onto it either yesterday or the day before, and it redirects to a facebook page.

Not sure what happened with LFG but it's not actually the first time they've redirected tot he Fb page, they've had server trouble before. Not saying it's this just that it's not really unusual. Dunno what's the reason, they just say "server trouble again". And point out a possible explanation suggested by Something*Positive

Spoiler

At the very least, this explains that LFG, Goblins and a few others's issues are linked as LFG is providing hosting for them.

As for ECCC

Unfortunately we discovered today that Emerald City Comicon's website was hacked into, including our backup files, and everything is now gone and unable to be retrieved.

We now begin the long process of building our site from scratch, which will take several days at least.

Sorry, but lol @ backups.

The purpose of a backup copy is to produce an image of data which is unlikely to be destroyed by the act that destroyed the original

Backup copies should be stored at a different physical location to the originals.

Taken from Principles of Network and System Administration [http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=NUqWuORoCjkC&pg=PA240&lpg=PA240&source=bl&ots=rFQfdgHJtS&sig=3E2H0BhjstZky4BGiWryNdZp8E4&hl=en&sa=X&ei=isgJUcSOHajQ0QWRv4CoDQ&ved=0CC8Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false].