MasterCard Hit By WikiLeaks Payback Attacks

An anonymous reader writes "MasterCard's website has been hit by a distributed denial of service attack. Netcraft describes how the attack uses a voluntary botnet of LOIC (low orbit ion cannon) users to swamp sites with traffic. PostFinance, the PayPal blog and Swedish prosecutors have been targeted previously."

Comments

Re:Stupid action

[HungryHobo]

It doesn't discredit wikileaks though fox news types will probably claim wikileaks are the ones doing it.

It is damned retarded though.
a good ad campaign (mastercard doesn't care about freedom of speech etc) and taking your buisness elsewhere would do much more.

Re:Stupid action

[camperslo]

Whoever is doing it, such attacks are just plain wrong. Attacking infrastructure may be harmful and amounts to terrorism. That would apply even more so if transaction servers were hit.

Wikileaks releasing what info they have on practices within the banking system is the only thing close to being an attack that I'd expect from them. If more openness about what has or does go on within the banking system results in more effective regulation of the industry, then it is a good thing. That serves the sort of journalistic role that other media may be less aggressive about playing. When news organizations depend heavily on advertising from those they report on, they're more apt to tread with caution. Mainstream commercial media leans towards infotainment as a result.

How much influence do ad dollars carry? Imagine that there was a company pushing $500 million at promoting a phone platform. Then imagine publishers/media that wanting some of that $500 million fearing that publishing negative reviews would affect their slice.

The banks most likely have very real financial incentive to attack Wikileaks, but not being profit-driven, then reverse can't be said of Wikileaks.

Re:Stupid action

[Khyber]

"Are they "disrupting business"? Perhaps, but no worse than the lunch counter sit-ins did."

You very obviously don't run an online business.

I'm currently unable to accept ANY payments except Paypal, and pretty soon it looks like those are about to stop going through as well.

Considering I make about 5 grand a day on a good day, this is going to really hurt me.

For once, I'm just thinking about heading to 4chan's servers, and risking the jail time smashing every fucking machine there is right now.

I'm not THAT far from the database, either. Moot screwed up using his iPhone to post, I've got the GPS coordinates. It's only 65 miles away in LA.

Re:This has nothing to do with freedom of speech

[DesScorp]

"The US government should have secured it's own databases then if that information is so important.
they're the ones who fucked up.
not wikileaks."

Oh, I completely agree that the US needs to do a better job of information security. One of our problems is that we have far too many people with security clearances and access to secret documents and data. We've been violating the "need to know" principle for a very long time.

BUT... that doesn't clear Wikileaks of the violation of diplomatic secrecy. Julian Assange has been quite clear that he's not fighting for anything as noble as "government transparency". He simply doesn't like the United States very much, and wants to harm the government. Take the man at his own words:

Mr. Assange told Time magazine last week, "It is not our goal to achieve a more transparent society; it's our goal to achieve a more just society." If leaks cause U.S. officials to "lock down internally and to balkanize," they will "cease to be as efficient as they were."

Assange's aim is not a more open United States, but a crippled United States. He sees the US as the pre-eminent evil in the world, and this is his way of making war with it.