The Wikileaks War is on. A loose collection of between 1,000 and 4,000 “hacktivists” are fighting to take down the companies and individuals fighting to take on Wikileaks. It’s the best combination of Hackers, The Legend of Billy Jean and Pump Up the Volume the real world’s ever seen.
By now you’ve been introduced to the loose collection of “hacktivists” calling themselves Anonymous.
It’s the group responsible for Wednesday and Thursday’s denial of service attacks on companies that have stopped serving Wikileaks, dubbed Operation:Payback, that plagued online operations at Mastercard, VISA, PayPal and Amazon, interfering as well with the websites of Sarah Palin, Joe Lieberman, the Swedish government and others.
Said the group’s spokesperson, Coldblood, on Wednesday: “Anonymous is supporting WikiLeaks not because we agree or disagree with the data that is being sent out, but we disagree with any from of censorship on the internet. If we let WikiLeaks fall without a fight then governments will think they can just take down any sites they wish or disagree with.”
Statement Wikileaks on DDOS attacks
Wikileaks is aware that several government agencies and corporations, including the Swedish prosecutor, Mastercard, PayPal and State.gov have come under cyber-attack in recent days, and have often been driven offline as a result.
The attacks are of a similar nature to those received – and endured – by the Wikileaks website over the past week, since the publication of the first of 250,000 US Embassy Cables.
These denial of service attacks are believed to have originated from an internet gathering known as Anonymous. This group is not affiliated with Wikileaks. There has been no contact between any Wikileaks staffer and anyone at Anonymous. Wikileaks has not received any prior notice of any of Anonymous’ actions.
Wikileaks spokesman Kristinn Hrafnsson said: “We neither condemn nor applaud these attacks. We believe they are a reflection of public opinion on the actions of the targets.”