Apparent, but unconfirmed, identity of DoS attack source, according to Forbes Tech blogger. May be false, of course. Take with grain of cybersalt: http://blogs.forbes.com/andygreenberg/2010/11/28/wikileaks-and-the-failure-of-cyberattacks-as-censorship/?boxes=techchanneltopstoriesAndy Greenberg
THE FIREWALL
WikiLeaks And The Failure Of Cyberattacks As CensorshipNov. 28 2010 - 7:23 pm | 2,696 views
Updated below.
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On Sunday afternoon, as media from the New York Times to the Guardian began to detail the contents of hundreds of thousands of secret communications between the U.S. and its embassies around the world uncovered by a WikiLeaks source, the whistleblower site announced on Twitter that it was facing a “mass distributed denial of service attack” that, at least temporarily, had taken the site offline.
Within the hour, a self-described “hacktivist” who goes by Th3J35t3r (or TheJester) had taken credit for the attack on his or her own Twitter account. “www.wikileaks.org – TANGO DOWN – INDEFINITLEY,” TheJester wrote, “for attempting to endanger the lives of our troops and ‘other assets’ #wikileaks #fail”
On his or her blog and in an interview last June with the German newspaper Die Welt, TheJester self-describes as an “ex-military operative” whose work “aims to cause disruption to the online efforts of Jihadists on the internet.”
In this case, that disruption was short-lived. TheJester’s tweets soon sounded less self-satisfied. A post he or she later deleted said that the hacker was struggling “to finish what I started” and that the attempt to take WikiLeaks down had become “a duel.” By 6pm, WikiLeaks had its site, including a new page devoted to its “Cablegate” exposé, back online. At last check, you could see it here.
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In the end, TheJester accomplished little other than to demonstrate to angry governments and corporations around the world how futile a cyberattack on the site would be. Forget the fact that WikiLeaks servers are distributed in data centers across Europe, including in “bulletproof” hosts’ data centers run by Swedish providers PRQ and Bahnhof. Even if a larger, more sophisticated attack had successfully knocked WikiLeaks offline, its data would still have been published by its media partners–outlets that no doubt attract many more eyeballs than WikiLeaks.org’s unvarnished data dumps.
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TheJester seems to have confused Sunday’s blunter denial of service attack with that more sophisticated cyberespionage. In another tweet, he or she writes that “If I was a wikileaks ’source’ right now I’d be getting a little twitchy, if they cant protect their own site, how can they protect a src?”
On the contrary, WikiLeaks seems to have taken the attack in stride, with no sign that any of its data was ever compromised. And that may have only bolstered the site’s sense of invincibility.
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