August 13, 2012

Whistleblower site WikiLeaks says it is enduring a week-long attack on its sites, which is rendering them sluggish or inaccessible.

A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack overwhelms a website with bogus requests from thousands of different internet addresses, compromising its ability to reply to legitimate users.

The group has been enduring a DDoS since around the beginning of August, and it is intensifying, WikiLeaks said on Saturday. It amounts to up to 10 gigabits per second of traffic the group has to deal with. The attack targets both the main site of WikiLeaks and its mirror sites.

AP cites Josh Corman from online content delivery company Akamai as characterizing the attack as "a bit larger" than attacks commonly seen in the past few years.

Earlier, a group calling itself AntiLeaks claimed responsibility for targeting WikiLeaks. They called Julian Assange “a new breed of terrorist” and said they launch the attack in response to his attempt to seek asylum in Ecuador.

The previously-unheard-of group may be claiming responsibility for actions they are not doing.

Ecuador said it was going to make a decision on Assange’s asylum request shortly after the London Olympic Games.

The attack coincided with WikiLeaks’ release of a new portion of emails allegedly acquired by the hacktivist group Anonymous from the server of consulting firm Stratfor. The batch concerns the supposed existence of a US-based system called TrapWire, which allegedly collects images from surveillance cameras across America and uses them to track people for possible threats.

http://www.rt.com/news/wikileaks-ddos-attack-stratfor-509/