Defiance WikiLeaks bring down swedish gov MasterCard, Amazon, PayPal and Visa

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Dec 10, 2010
WikiLeaks cyberwar

# Swedish government's official website forced offline by hacker attacks

# Website bearing Swedish Justice Minister Beatrice Ask's name as its Internet address created to direct users to WikiLeaks' own site

# Websites of MasterCard, Amazon, PayPal and Visa subjected to 'denial of service' attacks

# Websites of Swedish prosecutor's office and lawyer representing WikiLeaks founder's accusers also attacked

LONDON: One day after attacking the websites of MasterCard and Visa for hostile behaviour towards WikiLeaks and its jailed founder, hackers forced the Swedish government's website offline for several hours yesterday.

The Aftonbladet daily said the government's official website went offline for a few hours, publishing a screen shot which showed the server could not be reached. The site was working normally again later in the day.

The newspaper also said WikiLeaks supporters had created a website bearing Swedish Justice Minister Beatrice Ask's name as its Internet address, which directs users to WikiLeaks' own site.

The 'cyberwar' campaign took off after Tuesday's decision by a British judge to deny Julian Assange bail in a Swedish extradition case.

Attacks on the websites of WikiLeaks' 'enemies', as defined by the organisation's supporters, caused several corporate websites to become inaccessible or slow down markedly.

Targets of the attacks, in which activists overwhelmed the sites with traffic, included the website of MasterCard which had stopped processing donations for WikiLeaks; Amazon.com, which revoked the use of its computer servers; and PayPal, which stopped accepting donations for Assange's group.

Visa.com was also affected by the attacks, as were the websites of the Swedish prosecutor's office and the lawyer representing the two women whose allegations of sexual misconduct are the basis of Sweden's extradition bid.

A spokesman for Visa said in an e-mail reply to The Straits Times yesterday that its processing network, which handles cardholder transactions, was not affected and its account data not compromised.

The Internet assaults underlined the growing reach of self-described 'cyber anarchists', anti-government and anti-corporate activists who have made an icon of 39-year-old Assange.

The speed and range of the attacks also appeared to show the resilience of the backing among computer activists for Assange, who has appeared increasingly isolated in recent months amid the furore stoked by the release of hundreds of thousands of secret Pentagon documents on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Assange has come under renewed attack in the past two weeks for posting the first tranche of a trove of 250,000 secret US State Department cables that have exposed American diplomats' frank assessments of relations with many countries.

He has also been fighting a remote battle with the Swedish prosecutors, who have sought his extradition for questioning on accusations of 'rape, sexual molestation and forceful coercion' made by the Swedish women.

Assange has denied any wrongdoing in the cases.

One of Britain's highest-profile lawyers, Mr Geoffrey Robertson, will help him fight the extradition move.

The cyberattacks appear to have been coordinated by Anonymous, a loosely affiliated group of activist hackers who have singled out other groups before, including the Church of Scientology.

Anonymous claimed responsibility for the MasterCard attack in Web messages and, according to one activist associated with the group, conducted multiple and repeated waves of attacks on other companies throughout Wednesday.

The activist, Mr Gregg Housh, who disavows any personal role in illegal online activity, said in a telephone interview that 1,500 supporters had been in online forums and chatrooms organising the mass and repeated 'denial of service' attacks on some companies.

Almost all the corporate websites attacked appeared to be operating normally later on Wednesday, suggesting that any impact was limited.

In a denial of service attack, many computers are harnessed together to transmit streams of data packets at a target computer, overwhelming its ability to process the incoming data.

A sense of the belligerent mood among activists associated with the Anonymous group was given when one contributor to a forum that the group uses, WhyWeProtest.net, wrote of the attacks: 'The war is on... Be very careful not to err on the side of inaction.'

Mr Housh acknowledged there had been online talk among the hackers of a possible campaign against Assange's accusers - identified by Swedish prosecutors only as Ms A and Ms W - but said 'a lot of people don't want to be involved'.

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE, NEW YORK TIMES

The Internet assaults underline the growing reach of self-described 'cyber anarchists', anti-government and anti-corporate activists who have made an icon of 39-year-old Assange.

 

[Dreamer1]

HaHa,Geoffrey Robertson QC ,he knows Spore's Lee & Lee very well.

De Souza v Min of Home Affairs [HC,S'pore]
You acted in a manner prejudicial to the security of Singapore: ..... Mr. Robertson levelled several criticisms of the passage relied on by BG Tan Chin Tiong .... Geoffrey Robertson QC and George Lim (Wee Tay & Lim) for the applicant in ...
www.ipsofactoj.com/archive/1988/Part3/arc1988(3)-007.htm -

 

[tonychat]

Nice work hackers... keep it up..

 

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A new age of govt secrecy is upon us
WikiLeaks' actions are forcing countries to find new ways to lock down their classified data
By Jonathan Eyal, Europe Correspondent

LONDON: What began as a straight confrontation between WikiLeaks and the US government has now turned into generalised cyber warfare, as supporters and opponents of the whistle-blower organisation hack into each other's websites.

The fury will die down and the physical damage to the Internet's infrastructure will remain minimal. But in the long term, this cyber battle will transform the way both governments and corporations handle their data, and the outcome is likely to be not more, but less, available public information.

Spokesmen for WikiLeaks deny responsibility for the attacks against the websites of credit card companies and online payment systems. That is probably true: the armies of 'script-kiddies' around the world needed no encouragement to hit at financial institutions which, in any case, have always been top targets for any 'hacktivist'.

Nevertheless, Mr Julian Assange, WikiLeaks' founder, claims that a higher ethical point is at stake. According to him, the decisions of companies such as Amazon, PayPal, MasterCard and Visa to terminate their links with his organisation amount to the 'privatisation of state censorship'. Allegedly, all these corporations are acting under pressure from the United States government to stifle freedom of speech.

But the fact is, online payment or hosting providers have to respect the law. Once they were advised by the US authorities that WikiLeaks was using material obtained illegally, they had no other course but to cut their ties. And WikiLeaks cannot expect to be treated differently from any website which breaches copyright, publishes child pornography or solicits donations for illegal causes.

Mr Assange also believes that his revelations do not endanger anyone's life. So far, only a fraction of the cables in WikiLeaks' possession have been published. Diplomatic tittle-tattle aside - they do not reveal a great deal of skulduggery. However, the leaks will be paid for in blood.

The fight against terrorism and the proliferation of nuclear weapons requires utmost secrecy. If Yemen bans US unmanned aerial vehicles from attacking Al-Qaeda targets because the country cannot be seen to be an American stooge, the result could be further terrorist attacks. And, if China can no longer talk privately to the US about handling North Korea, the outcome may be a catastrophic miscalculation on the Korean peninsula.

As a result of WikiLeaks' deeds, a new age of government secrecy dawns. It will come in many layers, each reinforcing the other.

Foreign leaders will be more careful about what they say in private, and will make sure that little is written down. Embassy cables will either be phrased in politically correct language, so as to avoid embarrassment if leaked, or will carry a much higher security classification, and be made available to only very senior officials. Government servers will be ring-fenced, and downloading capabilities will be disabled.

Meanwhile, private corporations are likely to follow suit. WikiLeaks is now threatening to publish what it claims to be a huge trove of secret data about a major bank.

This could be a bluff, but WikiLeaks' example is likely to encourage copycats, websites which spring into existence in the hope of gaining similar publicity. And every disgruntled worker eager to settle scores with his employer will be encouraged to leak some material. All major corporations are now increasing their investment in computer security, while restricting their staff's access to information.

But probably the biggest change will come in the way governments use their own national cyber warfare capabilities. Until now, governments have refrained from offensive cyber operations, partly because the consequences are unpredictable, but also because nobody wanted to unleash an Internet arms race.

On the eve of the Iraq war in 2003, for example, then-US President George W. Bush vetoed a cyber warfare plan which would have paralysed Iraq's civilian infrastructure.

And when Iranian computers were hit by the Stuxnet virus recently, many Western governments privately criticised Israel - the likely originator of the attack - for breaking the taboo on offensive cyber warfare operations.

But now, the reluctance to launch state-sponsored cyber warfare attacks may be over. For WikiLeaks has reminded all governments of the huge national damage which a single website can cause. Perfecting the means to destroy such websites and their material, or developing techniques to identify their contributors is now an urgent priority for all countries.

The Internet will remain a chaotic place, but one in which governments will have no inhibitions in using their muscle. The ironic result could be that WikiLeaks, the self-proclaimed fighter for the 'right to know', may go down in history as the biggest promoter of government secrecy.

[email protected]


Embassy cables will either be phrased in politically correct language, so as to avoid embarrassment if leaked, or will carry a much higher security classification, and made available to only very senior officials.

 

[IceLemonT]

The internet is like an ocean. Give respect and you have a safe voyage, else you'll find yourselve lying side by side with the Titanic.

 

[kensington]

For everthing else, there is...

 

[kensington]

 

[kensington]

Nonviolent direct action is a staple in the American diet. Our everyday freedoms depend on the work of activists who have put their bodies on the line to fight for the rights we enjoy. Despite that, many forms of protest are reviled in the present, as people are often more willing to condemn the actions of a few committed individuals as violent or unnecessary, than to judge the system, be it violent or unjust. But history reveals much that is hidden, and we will see how history will judge WikiLeaks and Operation Payback. In this post, I will analyze Operation Avenge Assange in light of nonviolent direct action as it has been traditionally considered.


The civil rights movement used sit-ins at restaurants to effectively shut down restaurants for their racist practices, just as strikers and protesters throughout the last century employed militant direct action to confront their companies in order to bring about changes to labor laws. In other words, without direct action, workers would not have the eight-hour workday, and people of color would likely still be riding at the back of the bus.

Much like shutting down a business, or shutting down a highway or a street, is the the recent distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks that shut down Visa. Are these examples of a new type of direct action?

Operation Payback uses a modified Low Orbit Ion Cannot (LOIC) called IRCLOIC that operates like a "voluntary botnet." Basically, you install a program on your computer so that your computer will direct numerous requests to a server, overrunning it with traffic. Your attack can be directed remotely via IRC, by the bot-net commanders at Operation Payback. This raises the question: how complicit is someone who installs the IRCLOIC? After all, they've just installed the program, they aren't actually directing its attack. Operation Payback claims 9,000 members in their video, calling the participants in the movement “Anonymous.”

Are these attacks against these institutions examples of radical internet democracy, undertaken by thousands of activists who are risking arrest?

According to Martin Luther King's definition of nonviolence Operation Avenge Assange may have been undertaken to defeat or humiliate Visa, in which case, it would not qualify for King's strict spiritual guidelines. King always did have a headier view of direct action than many of his compatriots.

I struggle to put an action like this into the same framework as the physical, intentional direct actions that I have witnessed. Participating in an action as a passive, IRC-controlled participant is much like those who, at a protest, are swept along with the crowd. They showed up but they don’t know where they’re going. Anonymous installed IRCLOIC but didn’t know what targets would be hit.

Similarly, protests are often directed by one individual or group, so the hierarchical nature of Operation Avenge Assange does not militate against its consideration in the historical framework of direct action. The people involved are like any people at an action, some more and some less involved.

There are other, more explicit definitions of nonviolent direct action, among them, Wikipedia's definition, which is: "Nonviolence (ahimsa) is a philosophy and strategy for social change that rejects the use of violence. Thus, nonviolence is an alternative to passive acceptance of oppression or of armed struggle against it." And direct action "is activity undertaken by individuals, groups, or governments to achieve political, economic, or social goals outside of normal social/political channels."

Operation Avenge Assange is an attack against infrastructure, not people. Nobody is hurt in a DDOS. Therefore, it is physically nonviolent.

Operation Payback has a particular set of demands, particularly, radical free speech on the Internet. Their target, the financial organizations that froze WikiLeaks' assets, had compromised financial neutrality and worked to block the political activities of a client. As Charles Arthur, the Guardian's technology editor pointed out, you can still donate to the KKK through PayPal. So why was WikiLeaks targeted? Because they chose the United States government as a political target.

When Facebook or Twitter take sides in a political struggle, as they both may have done by shutting down Operation Payback’s accounts, it shows the precarious position of freedom of speech on the Internet. What other struggles will the Internet establishment take a position on?

I hope that this lightning storm of radical Internet democracy does not, like so many protests, result in an authoritarian backlash. The Internet must remain a radical free-speech zone, and, whether or not you agree with their methods, Anonymous has made clear that those who do not respect free speech will be muzzled themselves.





(Guest author Jeremy John is a Technologist at EchoDitto, a leading digital strategy and technology firm leveraging new media and participatory technologies to affect positive social change. He has been an activist ever since he accidentally ate the red pill instead of the more harmless blue one. He's been an advocate for an assortment of human rights issues, including (but not limited to) debt cancellation for developing nations, closing the School of the Americas, decent groundwater standards in Indiana, and sustainable globalization. He blogs at glassdimly.com.)