Slashdot Mirror
DDoS Attack On Wikileaks Increasing
tetrahedrassface writes "According to the Twitter feed for Wikileaks, the attack on the controversial site is increasing and is now at 10 Gigabits per second. In light of the recent release of highly sensitive documents and calls by many lawmakers around the world to swiftly find, extradite, and try suspected rapist Julius Assange for breaches of national security, one nation, Ecuador, has offered asylum."
then you have nothing to hide.
At least isn't that what the government tells us?
Bravo, Ecuador. Though I do wonder how long he will be welcome once Wikileaks outs something big about Ecuador.
Arr! The laws of physics be a harsh mistress!
"...suspected rapist..."
way to give subtle bias in favor of the world's superpower against one person...
"suspected rapist Julius Assange"
Their attempt at discrediting the accuracy of the info by repeating the word "suspected rapist" is a bit of an old cliche, don't you think?
Also, does this still work, even with so much data available?
Mod points are a dangerous tool. Abuse them wisely.
They pulled all corporate and other countries leaks. Now they are simply an anti-US organization. They lost all claim to moral superiority or credibility at that point. Its simply a politically motivated espionage group now with an axe to grind against one country. Treat them like it. When he disappears, or accidentally falls down an elevator shaft on to a pile of bullets, no one will cry.
They also know that body scanners and related security theatre doesn't work, yet... :)
I don't care how much the CIA is paying tetrahedrassface, unless they're cutting Taco a check too there's no reason to include the bogus-ass "rape" charges in the summary.
A DDoS is more than a simple /. effect.
Only when your servers are not designed for massive amounts of traffic at a time will you be harmed by the slashdot effect. Usually it happens on /. because we link to some university Website, who is only used to maybe a couple thousand students and not millions of internet viewers.
Wikileaks is in the business of being read by as many people as possible - You'll notice Wikileaks is still UP during all this. This suggests they expected this kind of stuff and likely they have a sophisticated firewall capable of blocking DoS attacks and seperating the legit requests from the bad.
It's not just a popularity thing.
Put everything on bittorrent.
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
The US government has overthrown democratic governments, it's FBI has assassinated American civilians, the CIA is currently torturing someone to death in a secret prison somewhere in the world, and right now it has the right to extra-judiciously assassinate any person, even US citizens, that it believes to be involved in terrorism.
With these facts, I hardly think an orchestrated DDoS attack seems unlikely.
Electronic attacks like this are not what this government does
Re-read that a few times and give it some thought, then let us know if you'd like to amend that statement.
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
Yes, of course. People would be foolish to think otherwise.
There is zero possibility that it could be:
1). Wikileaks creating their own publicity by staging a "DDoS Attack" on their own. They *NEVER* play the victim card, *EVER*.
2). Every single person on the planet trying to "see what the fuss is about".
3). Some indignant hacker with access to a botnet delivering his/her own form of "justice".
4). Some other government (China, Iran, etc...) not wanting their dirty laundry aired.
5). Slashdot.
Only the pure, raw, satanic evil of the US Government - through one of it's "shadowy connections", of course - could ever deliver the sheer bandwidth of *TEN WHOLE GIGABITS* against a website. Why, that's almost one server with a CNA or ten average desktop computer's worth of bandwidth there - or 666 Internet connections at 15mbps... yeah... /sarc
Two problems with this:
1. The data centers are in another country - and bombing other countries is an act of war
2. The data center is in a disused nuclear bunker. So you're going to need a hell of a lot of bombing.
I believe that if the US Government wanted to stop Wikileaks, they'd simply bomb the data centers. Electronic attacks like this are not what this government does; It's what its citizens do.
I beg to differ:
"USCYBERCOM plans, coordinates, integrates, synchronizes and conducts activities to: direct the operations and defense of specified Department of Defense information networks; and prepare to, when directed, conduct full spectrum military cyberspace operations in order to enable actions in all domains, ensure US/Allied freedom of action in cyberspace and deny the same to our adversaries."
Looks like they're "denying the same to their adversaries" (maybe).
You mean that Assange *didn't* suddenly become a child molester and rapist exactly two weeks after releasing a cache of classified documents that embarrassed the most powerful country in the world? Are you implying those charges might be TRUMPED-UP as part of an attempt at character assassination?!?!? The hell you say!
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
The main site seems to work fine after
A) Worldwide mass interest
B) DDOS
C) slashdotting and other causes of sudden increase in traffic.
This should be featured on Discovery's "How do they do it." for sure. I'm peaked.
Hivemind harvest in progress..
And you know that your favorite fantasy redneck villain is behind this (as opposed to Iranians, Chinese, Koreans, Saudis, or anyone else unhappy about their off the record discussions being made public) how, exactly? Ah, you don't. It's just a chance for you to make a petulent, sniffing, elitist poke at your favorite stereotype, from your own basement, while wearing your mother's clothes, with a Julien Assange blow-up doll in your lap. Right? Because I have just as much information about you as you have about the imaginary person you're blaming. What's especially fun is that you miss the irony of your preferred state of affairs, where "well-educated" people with broken ethics considered their own smartness to be a license to be jackasses.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Censor...
I do not think that word means what you think it means.
Rape?
Yep, nothing spreads peace like discrediting diplomacy.
That's just shifting the ambivalence towards another term, in this case "civilian"
Are informants civilians? Are diplomats?
right...
An intelligence source is 100% civilian and innocent. An enemy combatant such as a member of the Taliban or Al Qaeda gang member is not a civilian and not innocent. The US soldiers are at war with the foreign soldiers. It's expected that soldiers on both sides of a war are going to die.
Intelligence sources are not soldiers. They are people who have surrendered to the US government. They had the option to surrender to the Taliban, to Iran, but chose to surrender to the US Government. Whether it was because the US Government had the bigger better military or whether it's because they just hate Al Qaeda and the Taliban, they sided with the USA and the USA has a sacred trust to protect their identity at any cost.
Assange thinks he is more important than he is. Exposing intelligence sources is never acceptable. It's as bad as torture which we agree is not acceptable, or killing women and children. So if Assange gets an entire family killed off because of this leak, or several families are ruined, this is okay to you?
But if the USA bombs the wrong house by accident then it's not okay?
...that he decided to spread US diplomatic cables. Imagine if he had gotten a hold of a similar set of Russian ones and publicized them. His site wouldn't be DDOS'ed, he'd be dead.
This is why I consider Assange to be nothing more than an asshole at best (or a terrorist at worst) with an axe to grind against the US, not some messaih out to save the world from Evil(tm) Secret Governmnets(tm). Unless he honestly expects us to believe absolutely no other government in the world has skeletons in its closet, the fact that he only picks on the country least likely to send assassins after him* puts a huge "coward" label on him.
If he had the chutzpa to do this with any other country on the planet in addition to the US, maybe I'd have more respect for the guy. But now? He's just an asshole.
*: Like it or not, America IS most likely the most diplomatic country out there in issues like these.
If any heads should roll over the leaks, it should be those of the guy who stole the data and whatever dunce(s) allowed peons access to the data.
The US allowed it. This is a side-effect to the booming defense/security industry that developed after 9/11. Companies providing these services blossomed which resulted in millions more people requiring security clearances. More people + rushed investigations = more potential for leaks.
If he were an Arab Muslim, he would already be dead if they had his location. This is because the largest enemy a government like the US has is it's own population, and the assassination of a white well-to-do activist would be far more alarming than another dead Arab.
They are using their diplomatic contacts to try to force him into hiding. If that doesn't work, you can bet they have plans to take him out with rendition or staging an accident. You can step on toes to a certain extent, but once you start getting in the way of business getting done, you can start counting you life down in hours.
Wikileaks just wants to embarrass the U.S. and damage the ties the U.S. has with other nations. There was nothing criminal or even shocking other than the candid opinions of lower level personal in the state department about other countries and said countries leaders. The worst thing is that this damages the relationship between the U.S. and various other countries, especially those in the Middle East as well as many Middle East countries relationship with Iran.
This is just Assange using wikileaks to attack a country he hates.
If anything, my reaction is akin to that of the "Bull in a China Shop" experiment on MythBusters. You hear that Wikileaks announces a big leak, they hype it up, you get all this anticipation, and when the actual results come out, they're... amusing, fascinating, but not "OMG national security crisis!!1!" (the smashing ceramics) material. The worst we've seen in the cables is that the US spies on the UN and other countries via diplomats, but that's hardly surprising given that they had no compunction against spying against its own citizens for about a decade now-- heck, I'm sure the CIA spied on everyone ever since they were created.
If the intended aim of the leak was to shame governments into greater transparency and openness, I have to say that this leak is doomed to failure. Nearly all diplomats are part negotiator, part politician-- and all politicians never liked to be embarrassed in public. What it will very likely do instead is really mess with relations that have been slowly rebuilt in recent years-- China and Russia come to mind, and don't get me started on how much this sets back the 6-party talks now that the DPRK is warming up their artillery. Now that the Arabs' desire to end Iran's nuclear ambitions is out in the open, I doubt they'll be as forthcoming as they were when the toner cartridge bomb plot was brought to our attention. The great irony of these is that it is not that the content of the leaks themselves were a national security risk if kept secret, but that in leaking the material and messing up trust relationships with countries we'd rather not turn into radioactive glass (MAD), the leaking can easily make endeavors toward peace an order of magnitude more difficult. Now North Korea and Iran can say, "How can we trust you, when you're going to let confidential deals out into the open?"
What's more, this leak tells governments not that they should open up and avoid criticism and ridicule, but that they should keep even more from the public in order to avoid pissing off allies and potential allies.
Assange should never have targeted the State Department-- if he wanted real dirt, he should have kept the focus on the CIA, and Justice and Defense Departments.
"We are Microsoft. You shall be assimilated. Competition is futile."
If two nations can't trust each other, then how on earth do you expect them to be at peace with each other?
This is a solved problem. You set up systems of checks and balances that don't require the nations to trust one another. They can verify what the other one is doing. In fact, if the only way nations could be at peace was for them to trust one another, there'd be war all around.
It's called accountability, and it's always beneficial.
Why does not Wikileaks post all their leaks on Freenet which is somewhat robust to DDoS _and_ provides great encryption and anonymity?
Someone is mirroring the data on I2P which is much faster and better than Freenet, IMO.
The rule is do not harm civilians.
Why is Wikileaks held to this rule and not the US Government?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Same here. Heck, "The Founding Fathers" of the country were terrorists.
Of course "the founding fathers" of most revolutions are terrorists when viewed from the other side. However, I'm not sure I'd want to be on his side...
He seems to be a revolutionary against the government of the USA (non-partisan). Although, I'm not in favor of some of the things the government of the USA does, we have a ballot box to fix most things and I don't think the revolution that Thomas Jefferson had in mind had much to do about the dribble coming out of wikileaks these days...
Besides, if that Julian guy is a true revolutionary, he should be comfortable with martyr status and be willing to give himself up for the cause to prove his point.
You are very biased and have a lot of free time, since you posted at least 15 messages in this thread.
An easy example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plame#.22Plamegate.22
Intelligence sources have been exposed by US government, and most probably a few people have been killed following this 'leak'.
Would you condemn Bush, or only Assange, since he's not american ?