- “We fight for the same reasons: We want transparency and we counter censorship”, says the group as they carry out attacks on various targets for anti-Wikileaks behavior
- So far, the cyber-activist group has launched DDoS attacks on PayPal and its blog for ceasing to process donations to Wikileaks, and the PostFinance.ch bank for freezing Julian Assange’s bank account. This has resulted in the PayPal site and its blog being inactive for more than 8 hours, as well as 11 hours of service downtime for the bank.
- Anonymous has announced a series of new targets for the next few days, including Twitter for allegedly censoring Wikileaks discussions
According to PandaLabs,the anti-malware laboratory at Panda SecurityPanda Security –The Cloud Security Company–, Anonymous, the cyber-group responsible for launching a series of attacks against copyright societies worldwide last October is now performing further attacks in defense of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. Anonymous has circulated a statement indicating that it has no affiliation with Wikileaks or its founder, but shows its full support of Assange, as “They fight for the same reason: Transparency and anti-censorship”.
So far PandaLabs has detected three attacks. The first two hit Paypal and its blog for suspending donations to Wikileaks, and have resulted in over 8 hours of total downtime.
The third attack, however, affected the PostFinance.ch bank for freezing Assange’s account and has already resulted in more than 11 hours of downtime. Users even turned to Twitter to ask cyber-activists to stop the attack for at least 10 minutes to be able to use the bank’s online services.
Finally, last Monday, the Anonymous group’s own website suffered a series of DDoS attacks that rendered it inactive for some hours. Anonymous is planning to continue with its campaign in favor of Julian Assange by attacking any institution who tries to silence or discourage Wikileaks. The group has already threatened Twitter for allegedly suppressing Wikileaks discussions (tweets with the hashtag #wikileaks), even though these threats have not yet materialized. We will follow up this story very closely.
Visit the PandaLabs blog for the latest information about the attacks.