4chan based group ‘Anonymous’ targeting PayPal with DDoS attacks
4chan based group ‘Anonymous’ supporting WikiLeaks
A group of hackers connected to the online image board 4chan – & referred to as ‘Anonymous’ have retaliated against several websites which have recently denied service to WikiLeaks, shortly after the secret embassy cables began to be leaked onto their website, by means of a DDoS attack.
What is a DDoS attack?
A denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) or distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS attack) is an attempt to make a computer resource unavailable to its intended users.
DD0S attacks – a form of hacking & is illegal, carries a pretty harsh penalty if the offending party/ parties are bought to justice- as proven in the USA not that long ago when a man was sentenced to 30 months imprisonment, over $50,000 in fines, and 3 additional years of ‘supervised release’ for carrying out DDoS attacks on polititions’ websites.
PostFinance website currently offline due to being hacked
The site of Swiss bank ‘PostFinance‘, which has closed the account of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, has been taken down and at the time of writing this post- remains offline.
Hackers have also attacked PayPal but so far have only managed to take down the site’s blog – the place where PayPal recently posted this statement:
PayPal has permanently restricted the account used by WikiLeaks due to a violation of the PayPal Acceptable Use Policy, which states that our payment service cannot be used for any activities that encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to engage in illegal activity
PayPal’s normal payment services currently remain operational.
A spokesman for the group behind the attacks on PayPal and PostFinance (known for not holding back on using illegal means to achieve its goals) said they will target any website that’s
bowing down to government pressure
They also added:
While we don’t have much of an affiliation with WikiLeaks, we fight for the same: we want transparency (in our case in copyright) and we counter censorship
-the group said in a statement, according to Panda Security.
The attempts to silence WikiLeaks are long strides closer to a world where we can not say what we think and not express how we feel. We can not let this happen
- it added.
Anonymous are allegedly the same group behind the series of attacks collectively called “Operation: Payback,” which targeted anti-piracy organizations such as RIAA and MPAA earlier in the year.
Other companies that have recently denied service to WikiLeaks due to the leaking of cables are DNS service provider EveryDNS.net andAmazon. These sites claim they haven’t shut down WikiLeaks’ account(s) due to political pressure, but due to technical or procedural reasons.
