When Hackers Attack

Denial of Ser­vice: Priceless?

Update: ¹²⁄₉ 4:40PM PST

Last week, a grow­ing num­ber of attack­ers worked to pre­vent access to Wik­iLeaks, pri­mar­ily through var­i­ous forms of denial of ser­vice attacks. But, as I men­tioned in an ear­lier arti­cle, there is a sig­nif­i­cant sub­cul­ture of free infor­ma­tion among those in the com­puter secu­rity com­mu­nity.

The free infor­ma­tion peo­ple began to fight back this week. Mas­ter­Card began to refuse to accept pay­ments of dona­tions to Wik­iLeaks, so their site became the next vic­tim of a denial of ser­vice attack, called “Oper­a­tion Pay­back.” Pay­Pal was also tar­geted. It’s dan­ger­ous on a pub­lic web site to divulge too much about what’s behind Inter­net attacks, so I’ll leave the descrip­tion at that.

Visa and Ama­zon are also pos­si­ble tar­gets, since they have taken efforts to deny Wik­iLeaks abil­ity to con­tinue to exist. Ama­zon had briefly hosted the Wik­iLeaks home­page, but kicked the site off after a few days.

What’s fas­ci­nat­ing is to watch the online dis­cus­sions on secu­rity web sites. There is no con­sen­sus regard­ing Wik­iLeaks. In many respects, it’s like the infight­ing within the Repub­li­can Party over the degree to which the Tea Party should drive the agenda. But in the hacker world, this can turn into a large online brawl. The next week will be most inter­est­ing to watch.

Update: Sarah Palin’s PAC has now been brought down as well. Visa was attacked, too. So was Ama­zon, but they have more horse­power than the group could tie up. And Ama­zon is now sell­ing the Wik­iLeaks cables, though they claim they aren’t being hyp­ocrites by doing so.

You can also read a good arti­cle explain­ing how these attacks work.