Hackers launch cyber war over WikiLeaks
Image via WikipediaIt is, according to one breathless blogger, "the first great cyber war", or as those behind it put it more prosaically: "The major shitstorm has begun."The attacks present an opportunity for the FBI to roundup many in the hacking community. Whether they will be able to seize the moment may depend on how effective the victim sites are in fending off the hackers and running down the source. Sites like the major credit card companies probably have that ability.
The technological and commercial skirmishes over WikiLeaks escalated into a full-blown online assault today when, in a serious breach of internet security, a concerted online attack by activist supporters of WikiLeaks succeeded in disrupting MasterCard and Visa.
The acts were explicitly in "revenge" for the credit card companies' recent decisions to freeze all payments to the site, blaming illegal activity. Though it initially would acknowledge no more than "heavy traffic on its external corporate website", MasterCard was forced to admit tonight that it had experienced "a service disruption to the MasterCard directory server", which banking sources said meant disruption throughout its global business.
Later, Visa's website was also inaccessible. A spokeswoman for Visa said the site was "experiencing heavier than normal traffic" and repeated attempts to load the Visa.com site was met without success.
MasterCard said its systems had not been compromised by the "concentrated effort" to flood its corporate website with "traffic and slow access". "We are working to restore normal service levels," it said in a statement. "There is no impact on our cardholders' ability to use their cards for secure transactions globally."
In an attack referred to as Operation Payback, a group of online activists calling themselves Anonymous said they had orchestrated a DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack on the site, and issued threats against other businesses which have restricted WikiLeaks' dealings.
Also targeted in a dramatic day of internet activity was the website of the Swedish prosecution authority, which is currently seeking to extradite the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, on sex assault charges, and that of the Stockholm lawyer who represents them. The sites of the US senator Joe Lieberman and the former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, both vocal critics of Assange, were also attacked and disrupted, according to observers. Palin last night told ABC news that her site had been hacked. "No wonder others are keeping silent about Assange's antics," Palin emailed ABC. "This is what happens when you exercise the First Amendment and speak against his sick, un-American espionage efforts."
An online statement from activists said: "We will fire at anything or anyone that tries to censor WikiLeaks, including multibillion-dollar companies such as PayPal … Twitter, you're next for censoring #WikiLeaks discussion. The major shitstorm has begun." Twitter has denied censoring the hashtag, saying confusion had arisen over its "trending" facility.
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It is interesting that having declared a cyber war through WikiLeaks, these people sound affronted that the people they are attacking are resisting and fighting back. In the process they are creating more enemies who will have an interest in finding them and prosecuting them.
The NY Times reports on counter attacks against the hackers:
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By Wednesday afternoon, a counterattack had begun with Netcraft, a British Internet monitoring firm, reporting that the Web site being used by the hackers to distribute denial-of-service software had been suspended by a Dutch hosting firm, Leaseweb.
The hackers — a loosely affiliated group who call themselves Anonymous — continued to give instructions for the denial of service attacks via a Twitter account until it was suspended later in the afternoon.
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