Wikileaks supporters strike back

Mastercard

Mastercard’s website has been under heavy DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack for the past 20hrs because of their decision to stop processing payments for Wikileaks. As you can see from the image the website is totally inaccessible anywhere in the world. We tried to access it from UK, US, Serbia, and Germany without any success.

(Update: mastercard.com is back online - PayPal is under DDoS now)
(Update 2: visa.com is down now and Operation Payback says "It's down. Keep Firing") Tweet

This is the second revenge attack of this nature. The first DDoS attack brought down the Switzerland Post Finance Bank because they had closed down Julian Assange’s bank account. The closure of his account is thought to be of a political nature but as with all good PR releases they justify their actions by either clients breaking their terms and conditions  or in this case the reason for account closure was that he provided false information regarding his place of residence.

The group calling itself Operation Payback claims the credit for the latest attacks.

Seeing that Paypal, Mastercard, Visa, Amazon, EveryDNS and Tableau Software crumbled under political pressure and suspended their dealings with Wikileaks it is widely believed that  they will be forced offline soon because suppressing free speech and ending contracts under political pressure like that just gives freedom activists more ammunition to go against those companies.

There are lots of Facebook and Twitter users and groups calling for boycott of the above named companies.

Now that I mentioned Twitter it looks like they are censoring Wikileaks Trends and not allowing them to show up in their “trends” list even though #wikileaks and #cablegate are mentioned over 300 times in less than a minute. See Twitter gagging wikileaks article.

For those of you who don’t know, Wikileaks now operates from wikileaks.ch and there are currently 1005 mirror sites around the globe. You can see the list here: http://wikileaks.ch/mirrors.html

Last night Wikileaks posted a tweet/statement titled “We will not be gagged”. You can read that statement here

Please show your support to Wikileaks and spread the word and fight for Freedom of Information and Freedom of Speech  because if you don’t it will take years if not decades for another Julian Assange to emerge.