Attack

Just a day after Dutch police arrested a 16-year-old boy in connection with WikiLeaks-related denial-of-service attacks, websites belonging to the Netherlands computer crime cops and prosecutors have been struck with a similar assault. Dennis Janus, a spokesman for the National Police Service confirmed that both the police website, and that of the National Prosector’s Office had been offline for much of the day, with many theorizing that the likely reason is a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack similar to that which was launched against MasterCard, PayPal and other firms. ...

Controversial whistleblower website WikiLeaks was hit by another massive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack earlier this morning. On Sunday, the site was taken down for several hours via a sustained DDoS attack, just hours before the release of thousands of secret U.S. documents. Responsibility for Sunday’s attack was claimed by a single hacker, the Jester, though many are skeptical that it was the work of just one person. Today’s attack, which was initially focused on http://cablegate.wikileaks.org/, has been much more intense. At 9:00 a.m. ET, WikiLeaks tweeted, “DDOS attack now exceeding 10 Gigabits a second.” ...

Mashable: The distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack that took down WikiLeaks as the site published secret U.S. embassy cables over the weekend could be the work of a single hacker, working for his own agenda. The hacker, called the Jester (or th3j35t3r), describes himself as a “hacktivist for good” and posts the message “TANGO DOWN” after a successful attack, together with a link of the sites he takes down. The focus of his attacks, the Jester claims in his Twitter Bio, is “obstructing the lines of communication for terrorists, sympathizers, fixers, facilitators, oppressive regimes and other general bad guys.” ...

Mashable: Controversial whistleblower website WikiLeaks is reporting that it’s under a “mass distributed denial of service attack” just as its much-hyped leak of secret embassy cables has been leaked early on Twitter. According to a tweet from the website’s official Twitter account, WikiLeaks is experiencing a DDoS attack. The reported attackers are not yet known. Several reports state that the website has been experiencing intermittent downtime. We are currently attempting to verify that WikiLeaks is indeed under attack. ...