Wikileaks came under siege from hackers early this morning New Zealand time.
A so-called denial of service (DoS*) attack tried to deluge Wikileaks.org under a deluge of automated connections, blocking legitimate users.
No one has taken credit for t
Wikileaks came under siege from hackers early this morning New Zealand time.
A so-called denial of service (DoS*) attack tried to deluge Wikileaks.org under a deluge of automated connections, blocking legitimate users.
No one has taken credit for the attack, first revealed by the whistleblowing site's Twitter account.
The attack was ferociously intense, according to Wikileaks. But monitoring site NetCraft recorded that it was all over in a mere 15 minutes.
It was the second time unknown cyber assailants had tried to take Wikileaks offline; the first came just before the site began to place 250,000 diplomatic cables online.
eWeek reported that Wikileaks had anticipated it would come under DoS attack, and taken the precaution of hosting its content at three IP (internet protocol) addresses.
Two of the addresses are hosted by Octopuce in France, which also hosts the single IP address now used by warlogs.wikileaks.org.
The third is hosted by Amazon's EC2 cloud computing service in the US.
Whichever nefarious force, or government, is behind the Wikileaks attacks, it's no match for the best in web hosting services offered by America's private sector.
Despite its information-wants-to-be-free ethos, Wikileaks has so far only made 290 of 251,287 leaked cables public.
The site plans to drip-feed the rest to media over the coming months.
So far, none of the 1490 cables from the US embassy in Wellington have been released but a cable from London has been released, from June 2009, which notes, uncontroversially, that New Zealand is "pushing hard" for a full suspension of Fiji from the Commonwealth.
* Or distributed denial of service attack; DDoS
