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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."
Don't target the website, target the servers that do the money-traffic!!!!
And now because of Slashdot linking to MasterCard, their denial of service attack increased even more.
Reminds me of an article I saw on Techdirt the other day pointing out that Visa and Mastercard were getting all high and mighty about morality in regards to Wikileaks but happily fielding transactions for sites like the KKK.
My work here is dung.
Just like people volunteer for Folding@Home. If one believes in a cause strongly enough they could be convinced to lend CPU cycles (well, network packets) to help DDoS a site.
More Twoson than Cupertino
Visa *is* doing the same thing.
Freedom of speech, priceless. For everything else, there's Mastercard.
I keep trying to read the story at http://www.mastercard.com/ but nothings happening.
You actually make a very interesting point.
For the purposes of elections and raising funds for a political party, monetary donation is considered an exercise of free speech. That is the premise that allowed billions of extra funds from private individuals to go towards the election without any tracking.
Yet, financially supporting an organization deemed "terrorist" by the government is not a function of free speech. Now the lines are becoming even more blurred, given Wikileaks isn't even termed a terrorist organization. They are, however, denying the public the ability to support them financially.
By the same logic of the courts, this should be an issue of free speech. Mastercard et al are impeding free speech.
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As it should be!
Apparently, Paypal has admitted to being coerced into smashing the cookie jar.
Living With a Nerd
Note that the latest leaks show that the US Govt put pressure on Russia, to avoid legislation that would level the field for Visa/Mastercard competitors:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec/08/wikileaks-us-russia-visa-mastercard
Well, you see, the text of the First Amendment states "Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech". In this case, instead of making a law, they're just suppressing speech by strongly suggesting to the corporations that it would be in their best interest to comply.
With the Wikileaks case, the powers that be have demonstrated quite clearly that they don't give a damn what's legal and what's not legal. They're going to do what they're going to do, and screw the Constitution if it gets in the way.
I am officially gone from
"Act like fucking adolescents?"
This is the modern equivalent of a lunch counter sit-in. No user has had their computer hijacked, they are all participating of their free will. Are they "disrupting business"? Perhaps, but no worse than the lunch counter sit-ins did.
with websites selling fake viagra.
Last year I got a complaint from a Danish ISP that i was spamming their customers. I requested and got forwarded one of my supposed emails. A little bit of poking around I found that the viagra company was based in Hong Kong. Whois told me the address, names, telephone numbers etc. (you'd thing scum like that would hide their info better).
I phoned and emailed Visa, MC, the spam company, even their service provider. The only response was from that Danish ISP their tech guy if you can call him that was complaining about my continual spamming even after I gave him the proof that the email originated from China not Canada. You would think traceroute and whois are kind of basic tools and any dumbass should be able to use them but this guy didn't even know how to look at email header info.
As for visa MC they would not be bothered even though I gave them all the info (btw they were shipping their product from Texas) Visa and MC told be to get bent.
In America, distributing classified documents is illegal.
Not true. It's illegal to initially leak them if you have clearance. Republishing them is not... note that the New York Times has republished most of the leak; has Mastercard stopped doing business with them?
I would expect that to never come to light honestly. If they admitted how much the DDoS cost them, it would essentially give a 'quantifiable' damage scores (not sure how else to describe it) to anyone who pursued similar attacks in the future. It'd be fascinating to see though; the amount of lost revenue, divided by the number of unique IP's in the DDoS should give you dollars lost on a per-node basis. Then it'd give you cost metrics, and where there's readily available cost metrics, there's business opportunities. Just think - "we'll pay you $.01 to run this program for an hour!" while in the background you're causing 250$ in damage to a target. Sorry, mind is wandering in the dark side now :)
it seems that donations to wikileaks are still being processed by this startup: http://eu.techcrunch.com/2010/12/08/wikileaks-continues-to-fund-itself-via-tech-startup-flattr/
Maybe I'm old fashioned, but I thought you had to actually be convicted to be a criminal - not just accused.
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Such stupid actions will only serve to discredit Wikileaks further.
Undoing some moderation here but I must say: BULLSHIT! The only reason the government and these companies are going after Wikileaks is because Wikileaks has dirt on them, and Wikileaks has credibility. Your statement notwithstanding.
Look where all this talking got us, baby.
quite rightly distancing itself from Wikileaks because of some very illegal activities.
What is wikileaks doing that is illegal? And are they distancing themselves from the newspapers that are republishing the leaks? It's not quite right. It is a couple of very large corporations colluding to remove freedom of speech, when the speech in question reflects badly on them.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Whoever is doing it, such attacks are just plain wrong. Attacking infrastructure may be harmful and amounts to terrorism
Oh for fucks sake, NO, it doesn't!
Terrorism is coercion through FEAR (or, dare I say it, "terror?"). It is NOT embarrassing hypocritical governments. It is NOT interfering with our corporate overlords. It is NOT inconveniencing an ignorant and apathetic populace in their yearly December feeding frenzy.
"Ku-Klux-Klan ja, Wikileaks nein"
"Apoyo a organizaciones racistas"
'Je mag met je Visa- of Mastercard wel geld geven aan de Ku Klux Klan, maar inmiddels geen donaties meer doen aan WikiLeaks.'
"Ku Klux Klan'a bagis var, Wikileaks'e yok" [Sorry for the spelling, but
"[..]- nie ma za to problemów z donacj np. na róne odamy Ku-Klux-Klanu"
Shameless karma whoring:
New York Times Co. v. United States, 403 U.S. 713 (1971)
The unanimous opinion itself is very short; essentially, designating documents as secret and punishing anyone who publishes them is a 'prior restraint' and presumed unconstitutional.
We granted certiorari in these cases in which the United States seeks to enjoin the New York Times and the Washington Post from publishing the contents of a classified study entitled "History of U. S. Decision-Making Process on Viet Nam Policy." Post, pp. 942, 943.
"Any system of prior restraints of expression comes to this Court bearing a heavy presumption against its constitutional validity." Bantam Books, Inc. v. Sullivan, 372 U. S. 58, 70 (1963); see also Near v. Minnesota, 283 U. S. 697 (1931). The Government "thus carries a heavy burden of showing justification for the imposition of such a restraint." Organization for a Better Austin v. Keefe, 402 U. S. 415, 419 (1971). The District Court for the Southern District of New York in the New York Times case and the District Court for the District of Columbia and the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in the Washington Post case held that the Government had not met that burden. We agree.
Consumer action is another tactic. Here's the letter I sent my bank:
Dear Smile.co.uk,
One of the reasons I am a customer of Smile Banking is your commitment to ethical banking.
I do not believe that Visa's recent decision to block payments to Wikileaks is consistent with that ethical stance.
I understand that due to Visa's near-monopoly on card payments and online payments, it is not really practical for either Smile Banking or myself personally to discontinue our use of Visa debit card facilities. However I would like to send a message to Visa that this decision has weakened, not strengthened, their brand reputation to me and, I would assume, others.
To this end:
1. Please would you forward this message to Smile Banking's board of directors
2. Please would Smile Banking collate any similar messages of disapproval regarding Visa's actions from other Smile customers, should they be received, and communicate the aggregate message to Visa
3. Please, so that I can modify my behaviour where possible, would you advise me to what extent the following activities result in income to Visa
a: A debit card payment where I the cardholder am present
b: A cash withdrawal at a high street ATM
c: An online/telephone debit card payment
Many thanks,
you're comparing this to anti-segregation protests???
Who needs to get a grip, one who equates one protest with another or one who ridicules such comparisons?
Quite frankly voters can not make informed decisions when they are not informed. Wikileaks is informing voters of what their government is doing.
Falcon
Now as for "informed voters" that is another subject.
Should there be a Law?
this is ammo for those that wish to control the Internet. This can not end well.
Which of course is not the case in "the land of the free, home of the brave", the Glorious USA, where in the spirit of freedom and competition all credit card transactions are welcomed to be processed by assorted small companies in Russia, Finland and Monaco and are not nearly exclusively dominated by a pair of nasty anti-competitive global US-based cartels like Mastercard or Visa who own all the processing facilities almost everywhere and enjoy protection of bought-and-paid-for politicians!
Oh, wait...
I am highly critical of the release of the cables. It contained very little information for the damage done. I think the decision to release those cables was because they could release them and not due to the insight they provided. My impression is that ego and publicity had a lot to do with it.
CU, Martin
On the contrary, the cables contain plenty of evidence of government wrongdoing, although not necessarily by the US government. As a Swede, it is very interesting to know that the us embassy reports that my government prefers to share information about Swedish citizens using a "strong but informal agreement" instead of having a formal agreement, as such an agreement would have to be discussed by the parliament. If the cable is correct, my government is probably violating the Swedish "grundlag", which can loosely be translated as the constitution of Sweden. See http://www.thelocal.se/30654/20101206/