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Wikileaks Suffers DDoS Attack, Dropped From Amazon Servers
Bryan Young
Staff Writer
2010-12-02
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The controversial website, wikileaks.org, has been affected by a highly effective DDoS attack that crippled the site for the first half of the week. This attack is still under investigation, but looks to be the work of a sole hacker who calls himself "Jester".
 | | Wikileaks Suffers DDoS Attack, Dropped from Amazon Servers |  |
A distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack is carried out in two stages. First, a virus must be spread to multiple computers using the standard methods for doing so. Once that is complete, a central control computer issues a command for all the infected computers to begin the attack. At this point, all the computers begin simultaneously requesting data from the target in large amounts. This blocks other systems from being able to communicate with the targeted server, effectively taking it offline. This is not the first time the Wikileaks has been the victim of such an attack, although they did seem to be more vulnerable this time around.
Wikileaks hoped to find some relief in the cloud by utilizing the Amazon Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) service. This proved to be a short-lived venture. As of December 1st, Amazon decided to revoke Wikileaks' ability to use EC2. This came after much political pressure was put on Amazon by Congressmen like Senator Joe Leiberman, who released a written statement saying that "[Amazon's] decision to cut off WikiLeaks now is the right decision and should set the standard for other companies WikiLeaks is using to distribute its illegally seized materials." This move has been met with outcry from Wikileaks supporters who have taken up the cry of government censorship and quoting the First Amendment in blogs and new story comments across the internet.
Now that Wikileaks has been removed from the cloud, where they sought refuge from the DDoS attacks that they have fallen prey to, it remains to be seen whether there will be more such attacks.
About the Author:
Bryan is a staff writer for SecurityProNews
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