Wiki War: Hacktivists Take Down Visa Website
Web anarchists who attacked the PayPal and Mastercard websites have now taken down the Visa site. Skip related content
AnonOps had given an hour's notice that it would take down the Visa website as part of Operation Payback, a campaign against companies that have withdrawn services from the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks.
Activitsts urged supporters to "get your weapons ready" by downloading software from a link posted on Twitter.Supporters were then told to "FIRE FIRE FIRE!!!" at the agreed time.
Several minutes later Visa.com went down.
Visa said its website was "experiencing heavier than normal traffic".
A spokesman said: "The company is taking steps to restore the site to full operations within the next few hours."
Twitter later suspended the AnonOps account.
Sarah Palin told America's ABC News that her website and credit card details had also been hacked after she criticised WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
"This is what happens when you exercise the First Amendment and speak against his sick, un-American espionage efforts," the former governor for Alaska said.
Earlier attacks by AnonOps on Mastercard and PayPal were partially successful, affecting Mastercard's European operations.
Sam Kiley, Sky News' security editor, said: "This organisation is very aggressive.
"It's a counter attack to the suspension of WikiLeaks' services by the financial sector that supports them.
"They have attacked them to try and freeze them out of their business."
Kiley said Mastercard would neither confirm nor deny the attack but he knew it had taken place.
He added: "PayPal were knocked back, but not knocked out."
The attack came just a day after the same group of anarchists shut down Swiss bank PostFinance.
The bank had frozen money belonging to Mr Assange.
PostFinance's website was down for more than 16 hours.
Calum MacLeod, of information security company Venafi, told Sky News flooding attacks like those which have affected Paypal, Mastercard and Visa are difficult to prevent.
"There's very little that (companies) can do because it's like the hosepipe being turned on them," he told Jeff Randall Live.
"The programme itself is not exactly clever... if you organise 10,000 or 100,000 people to hit a website at the same time, that's not very sophisticated. (But) it works."
WikiLeaks has pressed on with its disclosure of secret diplomatic documents despite the arrest of Mr Assange.
Post a Comment