The WikiLeaks website came back online last Tuesday after being down for almost a week due to Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS). The secret-leaking organization says it has been targeted by DDoS making its website inaccessible or sluggish for several days. The attack was said to have began at the beginning of August and has intensified to affect other affiliated sites.
A group calling itself “AntiLeaks” claimed responsibility for the attacks following their post on Twitter saying that they were against Julian Assange’s intention to seek political asylum in Ecuador.
DDoS attacks work by sending heavy amount of traffic to the servers of a website in the hopes to overload them and to force them to shut down. Such type of attack is the most common form of cyber attacks. According to Wiki Leaks, its servers have been flooded with 10 gigabits per second of fake traffic from thousands of different machines. Experts monitoring the issue noted that the amount of traffic is larger than the usual attacks seen in the past few years.
AntiLeaks claim it has no ties to the United States government or any other governments tagged as enemies of WikiLeaks. Many people thinks the DDoS attacks on WikiLeaks was a response to the whistleblower website’s posting of documents showing how TrapWire works. TrapWire is a system being utilized in the US to counter terrorism by collecting and analyzing footages from security cameras and license plate readers around the country.
Details about the counterterrorism surveillance system were revealed by Anonymous following an email hacking incident on security intelligence firm Stratfor. WikiLeaks released the documents obtained by Anonymous early this year. Observers believe that it’s a secret digital surveillance effort currently being used around the world.
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