Wikileaks supporters shut down Visa, Mastercard sites

Wikileaks supporters shut down Visa, Mastercard sites

2010-12-09 05:58:14 GMT+7 (ICT)

NEW YORK (BNO NEWS) -- Internet activists on Wednesday attacked the Visa and MasterCard websites in retaliation for the credit card companies' withdrawal of services to WikiLeaks. The attack was dubbed as "Operation Payback."

The attacks were registered within hours of difference and the perpetrators, who call themselves "Anonymous," used a large distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack to knock down both websites.

The MasterCard website was unavailable for several hours and the company announced that the corporate site is having limited interruptions and will be son restoring its full service. MasterCard added that cardholders can continue to use their credit cards securely as the processing capabilities were not compromised.

On the other hand, Visa's website crashed at about 4:00 p.m. ET and it has not been restored since. The Operation payback group claimed responsibility for the action in its Twitter page.

The DDoS attacks essentially flood websites with traffic to slow them down and some times knock them offline.

The attacks began following a complaint from a Web services company based in Iceland, DataCell.com, that has supported WikiLeaks and currently hosts a site to facilitate donations for the site founded by Julian Assange.

DataCell's CEO Andreas Fink said that Visa attempted to force it to stop accepting payment details from Visa cardholders who wanted to donate money to WikiLeaks. DataCell operates, since two months ago, a payment gateway in which people can donate money for the non-profit media site.

DDoS attacks have also been launched against many other sites, although in a much smaller scale. The attacked sites included the Swiss payment transaction firm PostFinance, PayPAl and EveryDNS.

All these three websites terminated its services to WikiLeaks after the site began publishing thousands of leaked U.S. cables last week. The site claims to have approximately 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables but only over a thousand have been released so far.

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