The info about it was released yesterday, it probably happened last week if not weeks ago. I find all the "honeypot" and passwords couldn't be that simple arguments to be quite funny and ignorant. Working in IT as an engineer/admin for 25 yrs, I can tell you for a fact people do stupid shit. They are lazy with passwords, security, installations, and that isn't referring just to users, that is having to fix things other admins/engineers have done or haven't. For example, back in the day when I was forced to admin a windows NT network though being a unix guy, we would run l0phtcrack to check peoples passwords, and they were just as bad then as they are now. Until that day, someone gets caught using bad passwords, they will use 123123123 or superman, or wtf ever is easiest to remember -- all the stories about post it notes, under the keyboards, birthdays, etc, I have seen nearly all of them. Good security requires that the admins/engineers do the job correctly, lock down everything, least privilege, good password policy, MFA, and the list goes on. Not going to get into a linux vs windows debate b/c I really don't care what others opinions are and I am not a linux engineer anymore, but quite honestly linux/unix security out of the box is better than windows, though if you know what you are doing even windows can be locked down fairly decently.

So yes, hacking into some of this stuff isn't as hard as people make it out to be, social engineering, looking for the laziness and stupidity of others cuts down on the time required to compromise a system or a network. If you want a good hacking story, read "The cuckoo's egg" by Cliff Stoll

Is this hack real? At the moment I have no reason to suspect not. Is it fake, possibly, but to generate that amount of random stuff that makes sense would take some serious scripting and programming, plus how much of this have you heard on the lame stream media??