Wednesday, December 8, 2010

Mastercard hit by Wikileaks revenge attacks

Internet hacktivists are claiming to have brought down the Mastercard website as revenge for the firm withdrawing services to Wikileaks.

Julian Assange

The Anonymous group of hackers have also brought down the website of the Swedish prosecutors office which is pursuing founder Julian Assange.

It has pledged to launch denial-of-service attacks on websites it sees as anti-Wikileaks.

Earlier it hit the Swiss bank that froze Mr Assange's assets.

PayPal, which has stopped processing donations to Wikileaks, has also been targetted.

Anonymous is a loose-knit group of hacktivists, with links to the notorious message board 4chan.

"We are glad to tell you that Mastercard is down and it's confirmed," the group tweeted.

Mastercard has not yet confirmed the attack but security experts have said the site has been under a so-called distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS), which swamp a site with so many requests that it becomes overwhelmed,

However, access appears to be possible intermittently and it is still visible from some countries, experts say.

Earlier the group confimed other targets: "In response to the arrest of Julian Assange, Anoynmous has taken down PostFinance.ch, who terminated Wikileaks bank account, using a distributed denial-of-service attack. Subsequently, Anonymous attacked http://www.aklagare.se, the Swedish Prosecutors office, also using a DDoS attack, and took the site down in under 10 seconds of beginning the attack," the group said in a statement.

Noa Bar Yosef, a senior analyst at security firm Imperva said the attacks are "very focused".

"It is recruiting people from within their own network. They are actually asking supporters to download a piece of code, the DDosing malware and upon a wake-up call the computer engages in the denial of service," he said.

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