Mastercard Site Hit By 'Hacktivists' Over Wikileaks

[engine]

Mastercard Site Hit By 'Hacktivists' Over Wikileaks [bbc.co.uk]

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.

[enigma1]

I get it now. Now everyone is against Wikileaks and no companies official statement is to be trusted. It's that darn 'biased' media covering for the US government.

I'm not after the wikileaks debate so much, because I don't find much interest in this kind of politics.

But I am after the so called DDOS, despite their resources, MC is incompetent to handle a website. You have to admit it.

And when they have a technical problem, "mayday, we're under cyber attack ... we need help". The government must help now ... Like a nursery school. Seriously are they really a private institute?

Denial of service attacks are illegal...

I would suggest, to check your server logs more often, because this is happening pretty much every second. And so a law, as you want to put it, that cannot be applied, is useless.

If it was real, I would be a millionaire by filing lawsuits to every major host that exists across the globe. Or maybe these laws, you mention, are applicable to "some cases" is that right?
Like when they say "we are all equal" but "some are more equal than others"?

[Samizdata]

the company had not received any official requests

Companies that did not receive any official requests in the past week include:

* EveryDNS - ended WikiLeaks' DNS arrangements at 24 hours notice
* Amazon - abruptly terminated WikiLeaks' hosting on the EC2 cloud service
* PayPal - abruptly froze WikiLeaks' account
* MasterCard - abruptly banned payments to WikiLeaks
* Visa - abruptly banned payments to WikiLeaks

There was, of course, a public call made by Senator Joe Lieberman, chair of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, for US companies to terminate any agreements with WikiLeaks, but that does not constitute an official request by the US government.

Likewise, none of the public statements branding WikiLeaks a "terrorist" organisation or calling for the "execution" of its editor-in-chief (described as an "enemy combatant") were made by the US government, only by individual politicians.

WikiLeaks, as far as I am aware, is not a proscribed organisation in the USA and has apparently broken no US laws - or if it has there have so far been no charges, either against WikiLeaks or the New York Times and others publishing the same material.

There has, however, been a call from chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee John Kerry for the law to be changed to allow a prosecution of the WikiLeaks website.

The only official US government statement I have seen on this affair came from Secretary of State Clinton - "we are taking aggressive steps to hold responsible those who stole this information" - though the alleged leaker has been in custody since May and what the ongoing "aggressive steps" might be are left to our imagination.

As a webmaster I do not support DDoS attacks on any site, but it should equally be pointed out that WikiLeaks has been under continuing DDoS attack since the beginning of this affair. As yet no organisation has been identified as responsible for those attacks, and whether any request was made - official or otherwise - remains a mystery.

Or perhaps I should say "remains a secret".

...

[lgn1]

There has, however, been a call from chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee John Kerry for the law to be changed to allow a prosecution of the WikiLeaks website

So what are they going to do; pass a law retroactive to before Nov 28, making you guilty of a criminal offence retroactive. I like to see that one survive a constutional challenge.

All this will accomplish, is that the rest of the 250,000 documents will be published before the law takes affect.

[engine]

Attack Bot Downloaded more than 31,000 times [bbc.co.uk]

The data war between companies that have refused to do business with Wikileaks and the online activists keen to defend it is getting more intense.

The tool through which attacks are carried out against websites perceived to be anti-Wikileaks has now been downloaded more than 31,000 times.

Security experts warned people to avoid joining the voluntary botnet.

Oh, that's a risky business voluntarily joining that botnet.

[ChanandlerBong]

all the documents are already out there. The newspapers in question have them all...and a huge file containing all of them has been on peer-to-peer networks for some time.

as someone else has said, the efforts now by the US authorities has nothing to do with keeping the information secret, but of not letting the public have a clean, easy look at it.

[enigma1]

Yes, expect various social engineering methods by some, capitalizing on the news, to spread malware.

I guess the most popular "browser" now will be libwww-perl?

[frontpage]

@ ChanandlerBong

The "US authorities" have done nothing to prevent the public from seeing the cables. Period.

They have not shut down the website, nor seized the domain, nor served any notices to any host that is mirroring the wikileaks site.

In fact, the hero to the left Obama, has said very little about the whole affair.

What we have is just a disinformation campaign by Wikileaks supporters about imaginary censorship of stolen classified material.

Now, the same supporters of Wikileaks protesting 'censorship' are now engaging in their own censorship campaign with these orchestrated DDOS campaigns against innocent parties.

[edited by: frontpage at 4:50 pm (utc) on Dec 9, 2010]

[ken_b]

This begins to sound like some people see it as only a "USA vs W*k*l*aks" confrontation.

Think about it, name another nation that wants their own secrets published by W*k*l*aks.

Can't think of one? Gee, why not? Anyone think other nations might have a dog behind the scenes in this fight?

[frontpage]

It is funny that the the sanctimonious 'Anonymous' group is complaining about 'censorship' is now targeting other websites, thereby denying them freedom of speech.

If you have been following our blog post today, then you may know that we were under a constant and steady DDoS attack throughout the day. In the spirit of this post, I’ll go ahead and announce that the PandaLabs blog sustained 139 service interruptions and over 5 hours of downtime today.

A nice review of the DDOS situation.

[pandalabs.pandasecurity.com...]

[frontpage]

Check out this lunacy.

You can literally purchase the Wikileaks cables from Amazon yet Wikileaks supports are targeting Amazon still for 'censorship'.

Just goes to show most of these folks really don't know what is reality.

Amazon's UK site selling WikiLeaks documents

[komonews.com...]

Meanwhile on Twitter, @Op_Payback, describing themselves as ‘an ongoing campaign by Anonymous against major anti-piracy & anti-freedom entities’ posted:

Less than an hour ago, the Twitter feed posted this message: ‘TARGET: WWW.AMAZON.COM !’ adding: ’You LOIC will start in 2 hours. #wikileaks #payback #ddos’

[wingslevel]

amazon is supposed to be next - that'll be a taller order - i am curious to see if they can do it....

[kaled]

Think about it, name another nation that wants their own secrets published by Wikileaks.

That's entirely the wrong question. A more sensible question would be...

If the list related to a country like New Zealand instead of the USA, would companies such as Visa, Mastercard, Paypal, Amazon and others and pulled the plug? I think we all know the answer to that is NO WAY.

It's also rather odd that Amazon have now started to sell the Wikileaks data. I'm not often left speechless but that takes the biscuit.

Kaled.

[ChanandlerBong]

@ frontpage

yes, you believe that the US government, the richest, largest militarised "representatives of the people" in the world today, is sitting on its hands. You may also choose to believe that the military might of Yemen is fighting Al Queda alone and that the US government doesn't go around threatening and blackmailing supposedly friendly governments like the Germans. You may choose to believe all of that, it's your prerogative.

it's certainly not mine.

[lawman]

I choose to believe that the great minds of those who post in Foo can solve this mystery based upon pure logic influenced by personal agendas and pre-conceived beliefs all wrapped in a healthy dose of speculation.

[J_RaD]

amazon is supposed to be next - that'll be a taller order - i am curious to see if they can do it....

script kiddies with high speed internet.....we'll see.

[tangor]

Sorry guys and gals, this particular Foo has become distinctly similar to the iPood [reghardware.com...]

Handy gadget for the current topic... :)

[Samizdata]

I choose to believe that the great minds of those who post in Foo can solve this mystery based upon pure logic influenced by personal agendas and pre-conceived beliefs all wrapped in a healthy dose of speculation.

Have you been reading my cables again Lawman?

...

[moTi]

Check out this lunacy.

You can literally purchase the Wikileaks cables from Amazon yet Wikileaks supports are targeting Amazon still for 'censorship'.

Just goes to show most of these folks really don't know what is reality.

amazon takes down the wikileaks cables from their cloud with reference to their terms of service. then selling the cables which are available for free everywhere anyhow. needless to say, you can pay the cables on amazon by mastercard or visa. talk about lunacy.

[edited by: lawman at 8:08 pm (utc) on Dec 9, 2010]

[grelmar]

Oh, that's a risky business voluntarily joining that botnet.

Legally, yes, very risky. You're opening yourself up for both criminal prosecution and civil liability.

From the point of view of the security of your own system, notsomuch with the risky. LOIC is an open source testing utility that's merely being borrowed for use by the 4chan Anon crowd.

It's actually quite useful if you want to test the hardness of your own infrastructure. Realistically, it should be in the toolbox of every competent sysadmin.

[sourceforge.net...]

Sadly, this is a case where mis-use will likely cause the package to be difficult to acquire in the future.

[PCInk]

The Telegraph are reporting an arrest of a 16-year old in Holland:

[telegraph.co.uk...]

Between 4 and 6 years in prison, if found guilty.

[tangor]

Keeps expanding... looks like the end of the world coming on. :)

WikiLeaks supporters are milking Twitter's application programming interface to carry out attacks that have led to crippling slowdowns at MasterCard.com, Visa.com and other websites that cut off funding to the whistle-blower outfit.

[theregister.co.uk...]

[J_RaD]

all of those people could be busted, they think they are "anonymous" but all the ISP has to do is see someone DDoS'ing the IP's to these sites

not hard to spot, cut access.

[tangor]

I think these Wikileaks inspired DDoS attacks fall into this same category as this (not the one reported above, this one is in Manchester):

The teenager was arrested in the Beswick area of Manchester early on Thursday morning.

He is suspected of involvement in denial of service attacks which severely disrupted the online version of the game, and the playtime of many other players, in September. Distributed denial of service attacks are currently being used against the websites of Sarah Palin, Mastercard and other perceived "enemies of Wikileaks and Julian Assange".

[theregister.co.uk...]

[kaled]

all the ISP has to do is see someone DDoS'ing the IP's to these sites

Obviously, that's true. However, it's also true that if ISPs could be bothered to do this, there would be no botnet attacks because the account of every infected machine would be suspended.

Within the next couple of days, someone at Wikileaks will come out and say "stop - you're not helping". The reality is that they have enough friends to keep operating for the time being. Eventually, the US Government will realise the more effort it puts into trying to close down Wikileaks the worse it looks - I don't see it happening in the next few weeks, but maybe by Easter, who knows.

Of course, I'm hoping for some of the thermonuclear stuff to come out - I always enjoy seeing politicians being made to look stupid. That said, the US Government is doing a right good job of that themselves at the moment especially when you consider the constitutional rights of the press there.

There's not a newspaper in the Western World that would not have milked this information if it had fallen into their hands. It's not really so much different from the Telegraph and MPs Expenses - that was drip, drip drip as well. This is just a bit bigger, and it's the US Government being embarrassed instead of the UK Government.

Kaled.

[ppc_newbie]

FrontPage
re. PayPal

It looks like you are referring to an "older" PayPal quote from a few days ago. The Huffington Post shows that story as Dec. 4
[huffingtonpost.com...]

The link that I posted "PayPal Admits State Department Pressure" that also appears on the Huffington Post was Dec. 8(4 days later)was made by Osama Bedier, VP of platform, mobile and new ventures.
[huffingtonpost.com...]


re. Visa & MasterCard

Seems that the USA lobbied Russia on behalf of Visa & MasterCard.
[guardian.co.uk...]

Maybe there is a little back scratching going on there?

[ppc_newbie]

lgn1

Retroactive laws: Ex Post Facto
Generally speaking, ex post facto penal laws are seen as a violation of the rule of law as it applies in a free and democratic society.
[en.wikipedia.org...]


And now Lieberman is talking about scrapping Freedom of the Press from the 1st.


The leak that I want to see is BoA leak, covering the sub-prime & the bank meltdowns periods.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

Our military killed a routers employee, captured it all on video, yet had the gaul to tell the employee's family they did not know how he died. It's leadership who should be in the spotlight here, not someone showing that leaderships documents, imo.

[Ruben]

Supporters of 16-year old arrested guy DDoS Dutch government sites.

[translate.google.nl...]

[pat1780]

lets hope that it wont happen again this....

[webjourneyman]

Mister Julian Assange is most certainly a prick to deal with if you dont know him, he is also near to suicidal to know personally reported by my fellow countryman preparing to launch openleaks.

Still I just like him a lot, lot, lot.

If this feat is repeated in our century I'll win a thou.