CYBER WARFARE: Wikileaks Strikes back, Assange aressted

TO KILL THE MESSENGER

Web attacks on the Mastercard site have disrupted payments. The site is among several targeted by the Anonymous group of hackers, who have pledged to pursue firms that have withdrawn services from Wikileaks.

Mastercard, which stopped processing payments to the whistle-blowing site, said the attack had had “no impact” on people’s ability to use their cards.

But the BBC has been contacted by a payment firm that said its customers had “a complete loss of service”.

In particular, it said that an authentication service for online payments known as Mastercard’s SecureCode, had been disrupted. Other readers have also said that they have had problems with online payments. The scale of the problems is still unclear.

Mastercard has not responded to the claims.

It said in a statement that it was making “significant progress” in restoring full service to its website. “Our core processing capabilities have not been compromised and cardholder account data has not been placed at risk,” it said.

“While we have seen limited interruption in some web-based services, cardholders can continue to use their cards for secure transactions globally.”

Other firms that have distanced themselves from the site have also been hit in the recent spate of attacks including the Swiss bank, PostFinance, which closed the account of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.

For rolling news outlets Wikileaks has been a dream come true with thousands of US embassy cables dribbling out titbits of sensitive information and providing new headlines on a daily and even hourly basis.

But for the US government, the revelations are less welcome. The site has become its bete noire and after making its displeasure clear, US firms that have dealings with it have been quick to turn their backs.

The troubles began for Wikileaks when Amazon which hosted its servers in the US, withdrew services saying the site was breaking its terms and conditions. They continued when EveryDNS, the domain name firm which allowed the Wikileaks.org address to be translated into an IP address, withdrew services.