Bambuser came under a distributed denial-of-service attack on Thursday morning, possibly in connection with a user’s coverage of the Ecuadorian embassy where Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is holed up.
The connection is not certain, but Bambuser’s Swedish proprietors say they had received threatening tweets just prior to the attack. Bambuser chief Jonas Vig told ZDNet that the DDoS took the service down for “almost an hour” and made it “hard to reach for another hour”.
Bambuser lets people stream live video from their smartphones to the web. It has become very popular with activists and protestors, from the Occupy movement to Russia and Syria. The service has come under attack before, with the attacks generally coinciding with marches and protests that are being covered on Bambuser.
The stream that appears to have solicited the DDoS is that of ‘citizen journalist’ James Albury, who has stationed himself outside the Ecuadorian embassy in London. Julian Assange has been inside the embassy since June, and the Ecuadorian government is set to announce its decision regarding his asylum bid later on Thursday.
A diplomatic row erupted overnight, after Ecuador accused UK authorities of preparing to storm the embassy. Assange is wanted for questioning in Sweden over sexual coercion and rape allegations, and the UK wants to extradite him there under a European Arrest Warrant.
Vig explained that the tweets Bambuser had received were not of the ‘tango down’ variety, but they did indicate that “it was someone aiming the attack directly at some specific users of ours”.
“We still don’t want to speculate who was behind it, but there’s some indication it was directly aimed at blocking the streams from the embassy,” he added.
“It was quite a serious attack,” Vig said. “We consider all DDoSes as serious.”
A new anti-Wikileaks hacker, or group of hackers, called Antileaks has suggested on Twitter that he, she or they might be responsible for the DDoS.
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