By now you know the story of the Distributed Denial of Service Attacks (DDoS) on many of the corporations which refused to provide services to Wikileaks after that organization. Posted thousands of cable messages from the United States Department of State. These included Amazon.com, Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, PostFinance and EveryDNS.
Calling the attack Operation Payback, members of the group Anonymous began a DDoS attack against MasterCard early on the morning of December 8. At 7:53 AM EST, MasterCard issued this statement via wire service and posted a link to it from their twitter accounts:
“MasterCard is experiencing heavy traffic on its external corporate website — will you and you are a will or MasterCard.com. We are working to restore normal speed of service. There is no impact whatsoever on our cardholders ability to use their cards for secure transactions.”
BBC reported later in the day that payment authorization via MasterCard’s SecureCode had been disrupted.
MasterCard then indicated there had been some problems with payments, but no cardholder data had been put at risk and that they had made significant progress in getting everything back online. This was also put out on the Twitter Network.
A few hours later, MasterCard sent a Tweet in response to online activity, “Rumors of security breach are false. Numbers published are fake. Customer information is secure.”
PayPal, which has stopped processing donations to Wikileaks, has also been targeted.
The firm said Wikileaks’ account had violated its terms of services.
"On 27 November the State Department, the US government, basically wrote a letter [to Wikileaks] saying that [its] activities were deemed illegal in the United States," PayPal’s Osama Bedier told the Le Web conference in France.
"And as a result our policy group had to make the decision of suspending their account.
"It’s honestly, just pretty straight forward from our perspective and there’s not much more to it than that," he said.
An article from the New York Times claims the State Department’s letter was sent to Wiki Leaks and not to PayPal. Furthermore, the letter indicated the person releasing the information was violating the law rather than WikiLeaks for publishing it.
A huge social media barrage is focused on PayPal, citing this inaccurate information.
In a published statement PayPal’s General Counsel, John Muller, tried to clear up the confusion, “We restricted the account based on our Acceptable Use Policy review. Ultimately, our difficult decision was based on a belief that the WikiLeaks website was encouraging sources to release classified material, which is likely a violation of law by the source.”
Visa became the later in the day with the Anonymous Twitter account reading, “TARGET: WWW.VISA.COM :: FIRE FIRE FIRE!!! WEAPONS. The”
Visa issued this statement, “Visa’s corporate site – Visa.com – is currently experiencing heavier than normal traffic. The company is taking steps to restore the site to full operations within the next few hours."
At least PayPal is trying to let people know why they made the decision to stop serving WikiLeaks. If they haven’t (and if they have, I can not find any evidence of it) Visa and MasterCard should do the same.
Keep commenting as this story continues.
Update 12/9/2010 5:00 AM
DataCell, the Wikileaks payment facilitator, is taking legal actions to allow credit card donations to Wikileaks to resume. In the statement about the action DataCell wrote, "We can not believe Wikileaks would even create scratch at the brand name of Visa. The suspension of payments towards Wikileaks is a violation of the agreements with their customers. Visa users have explicitly expressed their will to send their donations to Wikileaks and Visa is not fulfilling this wish."
Update 12/9/2010 8:30 AM
Paypal Tweeting this AM "PayPal.com fully operational despite DDoS attacks. http://bit.ly/egsBBs Attacks confirmed but only slowing site for brief periods"
Meanwhile, Twitter denies it has taken WikiLeaks or any other topic from its Trending Topics list. Apparently, in fear of a DDoS attack, Twitter has gone public to deny the rumors stating the Trending Topics algorithm, which analyzes topics which are generating more Tweets than normal versus a straightforward view of highest volume topics. Meanwhile, several analysts suggest the Twitter’s Trending Topics are inconsistent with trending information from other sites.
Update 12/9/2010 9:00 AM
Twitter Trending Algorithm described by BuzzFeed. Twitter Trends values novelty over popularity and WikiLeaks has been popular since it was listed as a Trending Topic on November 28th.
Update 12/9/2010 10:30 AM
Looks like the heat may be moving back to Amazon today. Not because of something they did to WikiLeaks, but because they are selling a Kindle book in their UK Kindle Store containing some of the US State Department cables.
Amazon is getting hammered from three sides on this issue. 1) Should these classified documents be available from Amazon. 2) Why did Amazon give WikiLeaks the boot if the classified documents are ok to be sold on the site. Wasn’t the issue with WikiLeaks related to the classified documents. and 3) These documents are in the public domain, so why is Amazon supporting their sale?
Boing Boing argued that Amazon would “regret this rather ham-handed defense” referring to the arguments Amazon Web Services used in a statement last week describing the WikiLeaks violation of their service agreement.
For example, our terms of service state that "you represent and warrant that you own or otherwise control all of the rights to the content… that use of the content you supply does not violate this policy and will not cause injury to any person
or entity." It’s clear that WikiLeaks doesn’t own or otherwise control all the rights to this classified content. Further, it is not credible that the extraordinary volume of 250,000 classified documents that WikiLeaks is publishing could have been carefully redacted in such a way as to ensure that they weren’t putting innocent people in jeopardy.
It appears they may have been right sooner than even they realized.
Update 12/9/2010 4:00 PM
Twitter and Facebook have both gotten into the fight by blocking one or more accounts they suspect have been used to coordinate the DDoS attacks. Facebook banned one of the groups saying it was used to coordinate hacker attacks which is in violation of the user agreement.
Twitter also banned an account used by Operation Payback and refused to comment about what they may or may not have done and why. WikiLeaks’ Twitter account remains active and it fact was used to complain about the moves made by Twitter and Facebook.