Wednesday, December 8, 2010

Wikileaks Cyberwar: VISA Online Gets Smoked Off By Anonymous

"Sky News Online was redirected to the search engine Bing when it tried to access Visa.

Anon_Operation had given an hour's notice that it would take down the Visa website as part of Operation Payback, a campaign against companies that have withdrawn services from the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks.

It urged supporters to "get your weapons ready" then "FIRE FIRE FIRE!!!"

SkyNews - Hacktivists Attack Visa Website

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FP Tech Desk: Hackers supporting WikiLeaks target Visa

"(update 5:04pm EST the Visa.com website has now been offline for more than one hour)

(update 4:31pm EST the Operation Payback Facebook page has just been removed by Facebook)

(update 4:14pm EST the Canadian Visa.ca address appears to be working while the main Visa.com address remains offline)

(update 4:04pm EST the Visa website – both the .com domain and the Canadian .ca address – are fully inaccessible. A DDoS attack appears to be underway, as promised)

After successfully taking down the MasterCard website Wednesday morning on behalf of WikiLeaks, the same group of hackers brought down the Visa website on Wednesday afternoon."


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"Updated | 5:11 p.m. A group of Internet activists took credit for crashing the Visa.com Web site on Wednesday afternoon, hours after they launched a similar attack on MasterCard. The cyber attacks, by activists who call themselves Anonymous, are aimed at punishing companies that have acted to stop the flow of donations to WikiLeaks in recent days.

The group explained that its distributed denial of service attacks — in which they essentially flood Web sites site with traffic to slow them down or knock them offline — were part of a broader effort called Operation Payback, which began as a way of punishing companies that attempted to stop Internet file-sharing and movie downloads.

Visa’s Web site went offline minutes after the attack began and has not yet returned to service, an hour later.

On Twitter, the activists behind Operation Payback celebrated the apparent success of their attack on Visa’s Web site, writing: “IT’S DOWN! KEEP FIRING!!! #DDOS #PAYBACK #WIKILEAKS.”
New York Times - ‘Operation Payback’ Attacks Move on to Visa

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I wonder how the oligarchs that run our planet are going to react to someone f*ing with their financial system?

3 comments:

  1. I wonder how the oligarchs that run our planet are going to react to someone f*ing with their financial system?

    I imagine the reaction will be very ugly, and excessive.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Lets get it straight - Visa and the other payment processers have acted as Judge, jury, and prosecutor behind closed doors with no due process.

    Until WIKIL**** is found guilty of anything, they are so far out of bounds as to defy credibility. This has become a lazy, sloppy, unethical response to a breach of a poorly designed, and poorly implemented system.

    Since when have we made the financial entities the deciders of what may be published. That is the realm of the regulators (official, not the financial industry... We all have seen how well they handled mortgage titling (as an example))

    BemusedLurker (1984 closer; really closer than you may think)

    ReplyDelete
  3. Check out my post linking to a Reuters article discussing corporate censorship

    from the article:

    "None of those companies want to be singled out for helping undermine American national security," said Jeff Chester, the executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy in Washington, an organization that aims to promote democratic expression and human rights on the Internet. "It shows a lack of independence and an attempt to curry favor."

    ReplyDelete

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