Unknown hackers state Wikileaks war to continue

A member of the Anonymous group of hackers, which has been targeting firms it sees as being anti-Wikileaks has stated the campaign just isn't more than.

Speaking on the BBC's These days programme, Coldblood stated that "more and much more individuals are downloading the voluntary botnet tool".

This signs them as much as a so-called botnet, an army of machines that may then launch attacks.

Overnight Visa became the latest victim.

Its web site experienced problems even though Mastercard payments have been also disrupted.

Both have been victims of so-called distributed denial-of-service attacks, which bombard sites with requests until it really is unable to cope and falls more than.

The Operation Payback campaign is targetting firms which have withdrawn services from Wikileaks.

Wikileaks attracted the ire of the US government when it began publishing 250,000 leaked diplomatic cables. The government has written to Wikileaks, saying its actions are illegal but denies putting pressure on firms for example PayPal to withdraw services.

Coldblood, who is not an official spokesperson for Anonymous, told the BBC that "thousands" of individuals had joined up in what he described as a "war of data".

"We are attempting to maintain the web open and totally free but, in current years, governments have been attempting to limit the freedom we have on the web," he stated.

Entries on the Twitter page of Operation Payback, the Anonymous campaign, stated the Visa internet site had been taken down.

Visa's web site was later restored and spokesman Ted Carr stated its processing network, which handles cardholder transactions, was working typically.

But in each day of fast-moving developments, the Anonymous Twitter page then went down, replaced by a message from Twitter saying the account had been suspended.

Twitter say they usually do not comment on "the actions we take on distinct user accounts". Nevertheless, a supply told the BBC that the final tweet sent out by Anonymous included a link to a file containing client credit card information.

Kristin Hrafnsson, from Wikileaks, condemned businesses for example Mastercard for cutting ties using the web site.

Paul Mutton at the security firm Netcraft, who is monitoring the attacks, stated Visa is regarded as a much more difficult target along with the attack on it required a much bigger number of "hacktivists" - politically motivated hackers - 2,000 compared with 400 for Mastercard.

Earlier the BBC was contacted by a payment firm linked to Mastercard that stated its customers had "a total loss of service".

In distinct, it stated that an authentication service for on the internet payments called Mastercard's SecureCode, had been disrupted.

Other readers have also stated that they've had problems with on the internet payments. The scale of the problems is still unclear.

Mastercard acknowledged there had been "a service disruption" involving its SecureCode method, but it added: "Our core processing capabilities haven't been compromised and cardholder account information has not been placed at threat.

"While we have observed limited interruption in some web-based services, cardholders can continue to make use of their cards for safe transactions globally."
False account

Anonymous, which claimed to have carried out the attack, is a loose-knit group of hacktivists, with links towards the notorious message board 4chan.

It stated that it has hit several targets, which includes the web site of the prosecutors who're acting in a legal case against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.
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An Anonymous member told AFP news agency the group would extend their campaign to anybody with "an anti-Wikileaks agenda".

PayPal, which has stopped processing donations to Wikileaks, has also been targeted.

The firm stated Wikileaks' account had violated its terms of services.

"On 27 November the State Department, the US government, basically wrote a letter [to Wikileaks] saying that [its] actions have been deemed illegal inside the United States," PayPal's Osama Bedier told the Le Net conference in France.

"And as a outcome our policy group had to make the selection of suspending their account.

"It's honestly, just pretty straightforward from our perspective and there is not much more to it than that," he stated.

Other firms which have distanced themselves from the internet site have also been hit inside the current spate of attacks which includes the Swiss financial institution, PostFinance, which closed the account of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.

The financial institution stated Mr Assange had offered false information when opening his account.
Swamp internet site

Security professionals stated the web sites had been targeted by a so-called distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS), which swamp a internet site with a lot of page requests that it becomes overwhelmed and drops offline.

Noa Bar Yosef, a senior analyst at Imperva stated the attacks have been "very focused".

PayPal's Osama Bedier: "Our policy group had to make the selection of suspending the account"

"It is recruiting individuals from inside their very own network. They are really asking supporters to download a piece of code, the DDoSing malware, and upon a wake-up call the pc engages inside the denial of service," he stated.

Just before the Mastercard attack, Coldblood, told the BBC that "multiple things" have been being carried out to target businesses that had stopped working with Wikileaks or which have been perceived to have attacked the internet site.

"Websites that are bowing down to government pressure have become targets," he stated.

"As an organisation we have always taken a powerful stance on censorship and freedom of expression on the web and come out against those who seek to destroy it by any implies."

"We feel that Wikileaks has become much more than just about leaking of documents, it has become a war ground, the individuals vs. the government," he stated.

Some of the early DDoS hits failed to take web sites offline, even though that was not the point of the attacks, based on Coldblood.

"The idea just isn't to wipe them off but to provide the businesses a wake-up call," he stated. "Companies will notice the enhance in traffic and an enhance in traffic implies enhance in costs linked with running a web site."

DDoS attacks are illegal in a lot of countries, which includes the UK.

Coldblood admitted that such attacks "may harm individuals attempting to get to these sites" but stated it was "the only effective strategy to inform these businesses that us, the individuals, are displeased".

Anonymous is also helping to develop hundreds of mirror web sites for Wikileaks, after its US domain name provider withdrew its services.

Coldblood told the BBC that the group was beginning to wind down the DDoS attacks so that it could focus on utilizing "other methods that are much more focused on supporting Wikileaks and creating confident the web stays a totally free and open place".