Wednesday, May 18, 2016

Mastercard 'hit by Anonymous Wikis revenge attacks'


Internet tivists have claimed to have brought down the Mastercard website.The Anonymous group of s have also brought down the website of the Swedish prosecutors which is pursuing founder Julian Assange.
It has pledged to launch hits on websites it sees as anti-Wikis.But Mastercard said there was "no impact" on people's ability to use their cards for transactions.rlier Anonymous hit the Swiss bank that froze Mr Assange's assets.PayPal, which has stopped processing donations to Wikis, has also been targeted.Anonymous is a loose-knit group of tivists, with links to the notorious message board 4chan."We are glad to tell you that Mastercard is down and it's confirmed," the group tweeted.However, Mastercard said the site was still functioning. "Mastercard is experiencing hvy traffic on its external corporate website - Mastercard.com - but this remains accessible," said Doyel Maitra of the firm. "We are working to restore normal speed of service. There is no impact whatsoever on Mastercard or Maestro cardholders' ability to use their cards for secure transactions."'Wake-up call' Security experts have said the site has been under a so-called distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS), which swamp a site with so many page requests that it becomes overwhelmed and drops offline.Access to the website apprs to be possible intermittently and it is still visible from some countries. Continue rding the main story“Start QuoteWebsites that are bowing down to government pressure have become targets”
End Quote Coldblood Anonymous Noa Bar Yosef, a senior analyst at security firm Imperva said the attacks were "very focused"."It is recruiting people from within their own network. They are actually asking supporters to download a piece of , the DDoSing malware, and upon a wake-up call the computer engages in the denial of service," he said.rlier Anonymous confirmed other targets: "In response to the arrest of Julian Assange, Anonymous has taken down PostFinance.ch, who terminated Wikis bank account, using a distributed denial-of-service attack. "Subsequently, Anonymous attacked http://www.aklagare.se, the Swedish Prosecutors , also using a DDoS attack, and took the site down in under 10 seconds of beginning the attack."Incrsed traffic Before the Mastercard attack, a member of Anonymous, who calls himself Coldblood, told the BBC that "multiple things" were being done to target companies that had stopped working with Wikis or which were perceived to have attacked the site. "Websites that are bowing down to government pressure have become targets," he said."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 mns.""We feel that Wikis has become more than just about ing of documents, it has become a war ground, the people vs. the government," he said.Some of the rly DDoS hits failed to take sites offline, although that was not the point of the attacks, according to Coldblood."The id is not to wipe them off but to give the companies a wake-up call," he said. "Companies will notice the incrse in traffic and an incrse in traffic mns incrse in costs associated with running a website."DDoS attacks are illegal in many countries, including the UK.Coldblood admitted that such attacks "may hurt people trying to get to these sites" but said it was "the only effective way to tell these companies that us, the people, are displsed".Anonymous is also helping to crte hundreds of mirror sites for Wikis, after its US domain name provider withdrew its services.
Ending contractsThe attacks are part of an ongoing infowar involving Wikis. The whistle-blowing site has also been hit by a series of DDoS attacks, following the relse of a quarter of a million US embassy cables.It is unclr who is behind the attacks but it seems that Wikis is getting too hot to handle as many of the businesses that work with the site, distance themselves from it.On 3 December, domain name provider EveryDNS cut off service, citing the denial-of-service attacks as the rson.Amazon also ended an agreement to host the site, saying Wikis failed to adhere to its terms of service.It said that Wikis was unable to ensure that it "wasn't putting innocent people in jeopardy" by ing classified documents.Online payment company, PayPal, has permanently restricted Wikis' account, making it harder for supporters to make donations.The Swiss bank, PostFinance has also closed the account of Wikis founder Julian Assange. In most cases, the companies originally insisted their decisions were not politically motivated.But PayPal has since admitted that it stopped payments following a request from the US government. "State Department told us these were illegal activities. It was straightforward," Osama Bedier, of the firm, told the Le Web conference in France. PayPal had originally said Wikis' account had violated its terms of services.PostFinance, mnwhile, claimed Mr Assange had provided false information when opening his account.
Source: BBC

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