Several news agencies are reporting that WikiLeaks supporters have shutdown credit card company MasterCard and money transfer company Paypal today in retailiation for terminating WikiLeaks’ accounts.
Paypal has admitted yesterday that the U.S. State Department pressured it to cancel the account. But the State Department denied Paypal’s claim.
The U.S. Government’s overreaction to the leaks is igniting a worldwide cyberwar.
The following are reports by various news outlets.
(DailyMail newspaper) — Computer hackers have sent one of the world’s biggest credit card companies into meltdown in revenge for cutting off payments to the WikiLeaks website.
The attack was launched by a shadowy international group called ‘Anonymous’ which said MasterCard had been targeted for freezing the account of the whistleblowing site.
The devastating blow to MasterCard, as well as the online payment network PayPal and a Swiss bank, came on one of the busiest online shopping days of the year.
There were reports this morning that the attacks had gone on through the night.
Yesterday, a six-hour stoppage is thought to have affected hundreds of thousands of shoppers worldwide and highlights how vulnerable the world’s computer systems are to attack.
It is thought just a few dozen ‘hacktivists’ launched the electronic onslaught, which was taken up by other supporters.
The ‘distributed denial of service’ (DDoS) attack involved around 2,000 computers bombarding the website’s host computers with requests for information, causing them to crash.
WikiLeaks has been publishing classified U.S. diplomatic cables, to the fury of Washington authorities.
They have lobbied to cut off all support for the website which they are desperate to shut down.
(The New York Times) — A group of Internet activists who took credit for attacks on the Web site of PayPal on Monday, and knocked a Swiss postal service bank offline later the same day, said they were behind attacks on MasterCard on Wednesday.
The group, which calls itself Anonymous, explained in a statement that the attacks were an expansion of what it calls Operation Payback, an anti-corporate effort that now includes taking revenge on companies that have suspended WikiLeaks accounts.
Early Wednesday morning, the group announced on Twitter: “WE ARE GLAD TO TELL YOU THAT http://www.mastercard.com/ is DOWN AND IT’S CONFIRMED!”
Later in the day the activists carried out a similar attack on Visa.com.
The group, which started Operation Payback in response to efforts to shut down file-sharing sites, said that it had carried out a distributed denial of service attack against MasterCard.com — essentially flooding the site with traffic to slow it down or knock it offline.
Just before 8 a.m. Eastern time, MasterCard released a statement that said:
MasterCard is experiencing heavy traffic on its external corporate website – 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.
(The BBC) — 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.
Supporters of WikiLeaks were angered on Tuesday, when a spokesman for MasterCard, James Issokson, said in a statement, “MasterCard is currently in the process of working to suspend the acceptance of MasterCard cards on WikiLeaks.”
(The Washington Post) — Hackers rushed to the defense of WikiLeaks on Wednesday, launching attacks on MasterCard, Visa, Swedish prosecutors, a Swiss bank, Sarah Palin and others who have acted against the site and its jailed founder Julian Assange.
The online attacks are part of a wave of support for WikiLeaks that is sweeping the Internet. Twitter was choked with messages of solidarity for the group, while the site’s Facebook page hit 1 million fans.
Late Wednesday, Operation Payback itself appeared to run into problems, as many of its sites went down. It was unclear who was behind the counterattack.
MasterCard is the latest in a string of U.S.-based Internet companies – including Visa, Amazon.com, PayPal Inc. and EveryDNS – to cut ties to WikiLeaks in recent days amid intense U.S. government pressure. PayPal was not having problems Wednesday but the company said it faced “a dedicated denial-of-service attack” on Monday.
Meanwhile, a website tied to former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin came under cyberattack, she said. In a posting on the social networking site Facebook last week, Palin called Assange “an anti-American operative with blood on his hands.” An aide said staff moved quickly to secure the website and no data was compromised.
WikiLeaks’ extensive releases of secret U.S. diplomatic cables have embarrassed U.S. allies, angered rivals, and reopened old wounds across the world. U.S. officials in Washington say other countries have curtailed their dealings with the U.S. government because of WikiLeaks’ actions.
Undeterred, WikiLeaks released more confidential U.S. cables Wednesday.
The most surprising cable of the day came from a U.S. diplomat in Saudi Arabia after a night on the town.
“The underground nightlife of Jiddah’s elite youth is thriving and throbbing,” the memo said. “The full range of worldly temptations and vices are available – alcohol, drugs, sex – but all behind closed doors.”
U.S. officials have directed their anger at Assange, but others have begun to ask whether Washington shares the blame for the diplomatic uproar.
“The core of all this lies with the failure of the government of the United States to properly protect its own diplomatic communications,” Australian Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd said Wednesday, criticizing the fact that tens of thousands of U.S. government employees had access to the cables.
3 thoughts on “WikiLeaks supporters shutdown Paypal, MasterCard”
what a sad news!
Wikileaks and the final Judgment Day
One day, everything that moves on this earth will stop from moving, eating, drinking, talking, laughing, praying, dancing, dating, marrying, trading, cheating, lying, fighting, killing, governing, and judging others: It is a final Judgment Day where every human being must stand in front of a powerful and righteous Judge whose verdict or judgment is always right and correct. He has been keeping accurate records of all human beings since he has miraculously created the universe and put humans in this wonderful universe to glorify him, to magnify him, and to keep his Commandments in his glorious name.
All a sudden and without a further notice, sign or warning, after he has given human beings adequate time to repent and turn back to him and recognize him as the only sustainer of the entire universe, he appears in his glory to judge the living and the dead. He instantly opens the book, and as he reads it in the hearings of myriads of Angles, prophets, Apostles, Saints, and all the other living creatures, there will be absolute silence until he is finished reading the book of each person’s records. Finally, he closes the book, and the book remains closed forever and ever. Then with his fiery eyes, he fully surveys the multitude of people standing in front of his awesome presence to hear his final judgment that determines the destiny of each human being, good or bad, righteous or sinner.
His judgment is precise and swift: he condemns those wicked souls to eternal hell and burning; he calls the blessed ones to share his everlasting kingdom with him in his magnificent home – heavenly Jerusalem.
As the Lord God reveals the hidden deeds of human beings in the last Judgment Day, Julian Assange, founder of wikileaks, has revealed a quarter-million secret messages or documents of selected government officials, and those officials whose hidden messages are revealed to public without their permissions or without their knowledge are furious and angry at Assange, master of the Internet world, and by the revelation of such secret documents, the United States officials are badly disturbed and frustrated that their top military secrets against Iraq and Afghanistan have been disclosed to their enemies as well as to their allies.
By these extraordinary revelation of classified documents, the Arab-Muslim world are totally frightened, panicked, and alarmed that wikileaks has brought them an unnerving news that Iran is developing nuclear weapons, and these Arab nations are now begging the United States to do something that cripples Iran from developing such a mass destructive weapon in the Middle East that may destabilize the whole Middle East regions.
The most humiliating issue for many African countries, especially for Ethiopia, is, however, that wikileaks has officially admitted that Meles Seitanawi (Zenawi) has been for a long time on Washington’s State Department payroll for invading Somalia in the name of curving the spread of terrorism in the Horn of Africa. No one knows, for sure, how many Woyanne soldiers had been slaughtered as the result of that unfortunate war between Somalia and the Woyanne regime. Of course, Meles Seitanawi (Zenawi) will be accountable for the deaths of thousands of Woyanne soldiers and innocent Somalis. As we do not know how many Woyanne soldiers had been killed in the war with Somalia, we will never know for how much money Meles Seitanawi had been hired to destroy Somalia and to let his army perish in that infamous war, a war never approved by the majority of the Ethiopian people; however, wikileaks, one day, will reveal it for the Ethiopian people and for the whole world to learn a lesson from it.
The similarities between wikileaks and the Judgment Day are quite striking: both reveal secret documents created by mortal human beings to harm or to benefit others, and according to such documents, some government officials may go to jail as in the Judgment Day some are condemned to go to hell; others, as wikileaks continue the revelation, may get rewards for protecting their country from the terrorist attacks. The differences the wikileaks and the Judgment Day have are very significant to notice: The Judgment Day exposes every person for his/her good or bad actions in the Last Day; however, the wikileaks exposes only its selected targets such as big governments like the United States, the Arabs, the British, the Russians, and to some extent, the Africans. In doing so, wikileaks has incurred extermination from the Internet world; in fact, its creator, Julian Assange is now in jail in England.
Nevertheless, no one questions the integrity of the Judge in that Judgment Day why some people go to hell and others to heaven because his revelations of peoples’ records and judging them by their records he has kept are always flawless, and these are the great distinguishing marks between wikileaks and the last Judgment Day. The big lesson we can learn from wikileaks and the final Judgment Day is that nothing remains secret: “There is nothing concealed that will not be disclosed, or hidden that will not be made known” (Luke 12:2). God gave man the power to invent the Internet, and from the creator of such an Internet or web site such as wikileaks, everything is revealed: “Nothing in all creation is hidden from God’s sight. Everything is uncovered and laid bare before the eyes of him to whom we must give account” (Hebrews 4:13).
Therefore, my friends, when you put something into your computer, be careful because Assange and his crews are watching you closely even though you think you are insignificant and the information you put in your computer is travail. Nothing is travail or insignificant in the world of Julian Assange and his likes. God loves those who tell the truth, so does Julian Assange.
Thank you Gettu for your closing paragraph. I will remember that. But, I still doubt the honesty of this “secret” revelation considering the timing of the release and the type of information released and withheld.