A computer hacker group with at least 5000 members are believed to have sent MasterCard and Visa into meltdown as payback for cutting of payments to the WikiLeaks website.
The hacktivists called "Anonymous" also targeted PayPal, Amazon, a Swiss bank, brought down the Swedish government's website and are now after US presidential hopeful Sarah Palin's personal credit card account.
Yesterday, a six-hour stoppage on the Mastercard secure code system is thought to have affected hundreds of thousands of shoppers worldwide and highlighted how vulnerable the world’s computer systems are to attack.
The ‘distributed denial of service’ (DDoS) attack involved around 2,000 computers bombarding the website’s host computers with requests for information, causing them to crash.
A spokesman for Anonymous, calling himself ‘Coldblood’, a 22-year-old computer programmer based in London, said: ‘Websites that are bowing down to government pressure have become targets.
'As an organisation we have always taken a strong stance on censorship and freedom of expression on the internet and come out against those who seek to destroy it by any means.
‘We feel that WikiLeaks has become more than just about leaking of documents, it has become a war ground, the people versus the government.
‘The idea is not to wipe them off but to give the companies a wake-up call.’
In a further communique online, Anonymous warned: ‘We will fire at anything or anyone that tries to censor WikiLeaks, including multibillion-dollar companies such as PayPal.’
The spokesman added that the group’s intention ‘was to be a force for chaotic good’.
DDoS attacks, which are illegal in the UK, involve overloading a website with high numbers of requests so it stops working.
Anonymous, which openly admits to using DDoS tactics, wrote on its website: 'While we don't have much of an affiliation with WikiLeaks, we fight for the same reasons. We want transparency and we counter censorship.
'This is why we intend to utilise our resources to raise awareness, attack those against and support those who are helping lead our world to freedom and democracy.
'We will find and will attack those who stand against WikiLeaks and we will support WikiLeaks in everything they need.'
The group's Facebook site, which had attracted more than one million users, was taken offline by the company for violating its terms of use.
The microblogging site Twitter, source of much WikiLeaks support, could become the next target for hackers after Anonymous posted a statement claiming: 'Twitter you're next for censoring WikiLeaks discussion.'
Some supporters accuse Twitter of preventing the term 'WikiLeaks' from appearing on the site's popular trending topics, a claim that Twitter has denied.
The hackers have pledged an 'infowar' on companies that have withdrawn support from WikiLeaks during the past week.
As well as DDoS attacks, Anonymous is helping to create hundreds of mirror sites for WikiLeaks, allowing users to continue to access the website's content via a different server.
WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, 39, has been remanded in custody over claims that he sexually assaulted two Swedish women.
The websites of the Swedish Prosecutor and the lawyer representing the women were attacked yesterday.
Other websites targeted included those of U.S. senator Joe Lieberman, an outspoken critic of WikiLeaks, and Sarah Palin, who said Assange should be hunted like a terrorist.
[Source: The Daily Mail]
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