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Internet hacktivists are claiming to have brought down the Mastercard website as revenge for the firm withdrawing services to Wikileaks.
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.
what's it called when governments pressure private businesses into not doing business with an organization that the government does not like?
Hackers group Anonymous, which has been working diligently in support of WikiLeaks, claims to have acquired information for numerous MasterCard credit cards following its attack on MasterCard's website.
"To people of the industrial world, dismiss your #Mastercard now!" the group's Twitter account posted, with a link to alleged leaked credit card numbers, before the account was shut down by Twitter.
Remind me again who the bad guy is again?
[edited by: moTi at 4:00 am (utc) on Dec 9, 2010]
Last night WikiLeaks spokesman Kristinn Hrafnsson said: "Anonymous ... is not affiliated with WikiLeaks. There has been no contact between any WikiLeaks staffer and anyone at Anonymous. We neither condemn nor applaud these attacks. We believe they are a reflection of public opinion on the actions of the targets."
For all the delusional paranoia about 'censorship' of Wikileaks by the big bad 'government'; no effort has been made by the US to take down the domain nor webhosting.
The US government to date has not forced any business to disassociate itself from Wikileaks. If you actually read the press releases from Amazon, Visa, Paypal, Mastercard, etc; you will see the private companies took the matter into their own hands for falsification of data and violating terms of service.
PayPal was not contacted by any government organization in the U.S. or abroad. We restricted the account based on our Acceptable Use Policy review. Ultimately, our difficult decision was based on a belief that the WikiLeaks website was encouraging sources to release classified material, which is likely a violation of law by the source.
Classy folks. Protesting 'censorship' by stealing credit card information from innocent bystanders.
... this is private and should remain so.
When exposing the lies and revealing the truth becomes treason, that might just be the beginning of the end of the much vaunted 'free era'.
I think the only site down about this at the moment is wikileaks - not available.
Which of the 1334 wikileaks sites do you mean?
it's just odd to see hackers standing up for freedom of speech
[edited by: lawman at 3:15 pm (utc) on Dec 9, 2010]
Thanks for the research ppc_newbie. The misinformation out there is incredible...
"PayPal was not contacted by any government organization in the U.S. or abroad. We restricted the account based on our Acceptable Use Policy review."
Wiki’s latest release of highly sensitive cables sent by American envoys has breached its “acceptable use policy”, the US-based company said yesterday.
A PayPal spokesman said his company cannot be used for any activities “that encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to engage in illegal activity”.
A spokeswoman for Paypal said: "We can confirm that there was an attempted DDoS attack on PayPal.com. The attack slowed some payments down for a short while but we remained fully operational throughout."
A State Department official also said the government department had not contacted Paypal.
US Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs Philip Crowley tweeted: "The US government did not write to PayPal requesting any action regarding #WikiLeaks. Not true."
The much-quoted Anonymous, spokesperson, who goes by the moniker Coldblood, is vowing to take down anyone having an “anti-WikiLeaks agenda,” according to the BBC. “Websites that are bowing down to government pressure have become targets,” he said.
Anonymous and Wikileaks have my full support.
Anonymous members launched their first distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attack on Saturday, taking down PayPal's blog, ThePayPalBlog.com, for at least eight hours.
Since then, they have taken down the websites of Visa, Mastercard and the Swiss Post Office bank for severing ties to WikiLeaks and the website of the Swedish prosecutor's office for pursuing Assange on allegations of sex crimes.
Aftonbladet said the official government website, [regeringen.se...] was offline for a few hours overnight to Thursday, publishing a screen shot which showed the server could not be reached.
Twitter itself could be the next target, according to a statement circulating online attributed to Anonymous and published by the Guardian UK. "We will fire at anything or anyone that tries to censor WikiLeaks, including multibillion-dollar companies such as PayPal," the statement said. "Twitter, you're next for censoring #WikiLeaks discussion. The major sh$%storm has begun."
The group known as 4Chan had taken responsibility on Tuesday for using a denial-of-service attack to shut down the sites for Swiss bank PostFinance and lawyers in Sweden prosecuting sex allegations against WikiLeaks front man Julian Assange.
[edited by: frontpage at 1:19 pm (utc) on Dec 9, 2010]
Anonymous was born out of the influential internet messageboard 4chan, a forum popular with hackers and gamers, in 2003. The group's name is a tribute to 4chan's early days, when any posting to its forums where no name was given was ascribed to "Anonymous". But the ephemeral group, which picks up causes "whenever it feels like it", has now "gone beyond 4Chan into something bigger", its spokesman said.
In an interview Wednesday morning, Joe Sullivan, Facebook’s chief security officer, addressed WikiLeaks’s own presence on the site. He said the company had not received any official requests to disable pages or accounts associated with the WikiLeaks organization.
Care to back up your assertion with facts?
What are your facts exactly aside of the published quotes by biased media?
