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“Hacktivist” Supporters of Julian Assange Allegedly Shut Down MasterCard Website

A group of anonymous “hacktivists” has reportedly launched “Operation Payback”—an online attack whose goal is to shut down the websites of banks and companies that have cut off business ties with Wikileaks. According to Huffington Post, the MasterCard website has been DOWN since approximately five o’clock this morning.

BBC has said that a group of hackers who are supporters of Julian Assange are taking credit for shutting down the MasterCard site. PostFinance, a Swiss bank, has confirmed that its website was attacked after it closed Assange’s bank account earlier this week.

Edited to Add:
From Huffington Post: WikiLeaks Cablegate LIVE Updates

From guardian.co.uk: PayPal admits US pressure over WikiLeaks account freeze

Sources:

Huffington Post

DW-World

– Elaine Magliaro, Guest Blogger

83 thoughts on ““Hacktivist” Supporters of Julian Assange Allegedly Shut Down MasterCard Website”

  2. I hate to spoil the party, but the Master Card site is not down and the Joe Lieberman site isn’t down either. I just tried them and both are operating.

  3. The essential predicament of authoritarian tyranny is its inextricable proclivity to destroy itself to save itself.

    And to destroy everything else.

    As the late psychiatrist, Dr. Martin Cooperman wrote (his particular focus was the “psychoanalytic dyad”), reciprocal retaliation is a defeating process.

    I would tend to extend Cooperman’s view. Methinks that escalating reciprocal retaliation may be the one and only defeating process capable of absolutely defeating the existence of humans.

    It saddens me to observe pejorative words directed by one person at another person; while I may be terribly mistaken in what I observe, I cannot observe what I cannot observe.

    I observe that all supposedly dispositional attributions, as in social psychology theory, are actually made exclusively of situational factors, and traditional ispositional attributions are a deceptive fiction at best.

    When I was a child, playing with other neighborhood children, I was invited to play a game I did not understand. “King of the Mountain.”

    A dirt pile, and each child attempts to be the only child at the top of the dirt pile. To what extent has human society taken on a form analogous to a dirt pile, dirty children playing a dirty competitive game which portends of only losers?

    As soon as I was able to make any sense of the nature of “King of the Mountain,” I quit playing it.

    “King of the Mountain” has a curious feature. The smaller the dirt pile, the easier it is to be the only one at the top of the pile of dirt.

    Could that explain why “competition” (pardon the anthropomorphism) tends to destroy productivity while claiming otherwise.

    In the manner of the underground railway, perhaps we need to know what would happen were we to, in a meaningful way, understand what it would be, in ways practical and practicable, to actually follow the drinking gourd to real freedom.

    Can we ever learn to do better than I seem to recall was done at the strategic hamlet of My Lai, in the Song My village; to save something, we first need to destroy it?

  7. No telling how much trouble is facing Assange for messing with the bullies. We, the people, owe him our gratitude for shaking up those who operate under the “absolute power corrupts absolutely” law. If they cut off his money lines, they will have isolated his message, which leaves him only with the threat of what he has awaiting release.

  10. This is just the beginning. You really do not want to piss off us techies that actually run things. Governments, already guilty of war crimes, and banks, already guilty of fraud, have issued threats, and moved without warrant or due process.

    Meanwhile, the cables have been getting tens of millions of hits per day, even in this degraded capacity.

    Note to bankers: you’ve lost.

    Note to govt: you’ve lost.

    And now we hear from Frontline that we’re fighting in Afghanistan to preserve the right of tribal men to bugger their young boys.

    This can only come crashing down. There is no vector upwards. Keep pushing. Google will lead us to your front door eventually.

  11. Otteray Scribe,

    The government only needs to be patient.

    In about 200 years we will probably have computers that are capable of successfully breaking 256bit encryption in a relatively short period of time using a distributed attack. 🙂

  12. The hacker groups “Anonymous” and “4Chan” have effectively shut down the online presence of PostFinance, the Swiss bank that froze Julian Assage’s money. One user wrote on Twitter, ” #payback can you stop the DDoS on postfinance for 10 minutes so that I can bank please? pretty please?”

    To shut down MasterCard’s website with a DDoS attack requires a lot of computer muscle. Sources are saykng there are 940 voluntary computers on the botnet attack on MasterCard.

    The DDoS attack on Joe Lieberman’s website also shut down the entire Senate website. Collateral damage, I suppose.

    According to the attackers, the Internet hosting provider (space2u.com) of the lawyer representing the 2 girls who were allegedly raped/assaulted by Julian Assange has voluntarily suspended the ADVBYRA.SE website indefinitely.

    The best real time accounts are at Panda Labs, but expect their site to take a while to load. Not surprisingly, they are experiencing very heavy traffic these days.

    http://pandalabs.pandasecurity.com/tis-the-season-of-ddos-wikileaks-editio/

    MEMO TO SELF: Do not F**k with hackers.

  13. Well my Gawd, its nice to see the world of the common man finally waking up and ” paying back.” Kudos to them.

  14. I think they have:

    “the organisation must now find a way to operate without its founder.”

  16. Otteray Scribe,

    I think you are very right. Joe Lieberman doesn’t possess an ounce of power when compared to the banks and their credit card divisions. Sites like Amazon are far more dependent on the good graces of banks and their credit cards than on guys like Joe Lieberman. The pressure on Amazon from Joe Lieberman was nothing compared to the pressure of the banks, IMO.

    I have no doubt Wikileaks was prepared for every eventuality … this thing has just started and I bet they have a million tricks just waiting to roll out.

  17. One has to wonder about the true motives the banks and credit card companies that are divisions of big banks. Of course, I am sure they are under pressure from the likes of Joe Lieberman, but the impending release of thousands of internal bank documents must have some big bankers sweating bullets. If they can cripple WL before the document dump of banking insider leaks, they will have won.

    Somehow, I do not think the banks are going to be able to stop it, no matter what they do.

    And then there is that “Insurance” file that is allegedly secured with AES 256 bit encryption. For those who are interested in such things, the encryption on that is virtually unbreakable.

    AES permits the use of 256-bit keys. Breaking a symmetric 256-bit key by brute force requires 2128 times more computational power than a 128-bit key. A supercomputer capable of checking a billion billion (1×10^18)) keys per second would require about 3×10^51 years to test every combination of a 256-bit key space. For those not familiar with scientific notation, that is a three followed by 51 zeroes. That is several times the age of the universe, which is 14 billion years, more or less (only nine zeroes).

    Certain types of encryption, by their mathematical properties, cannot be defeated by brute force. An example is one-time pad cryptography. This encoding is one where every cleartext bit has a corresponding key bit. One-time pads create a random sequence of key bits. A brute force attack, given enough time, will theoretically reveal the correct decoding However, it will reveal every other possible combination of bits, with no way of distinguishing one from the other. A small, 100-byte, one-time-pad–encoded string subjected to a brute force attack would eventually reveal every 100-byte string possible, including the correct answer, but the cryptographer would have no way of knowing which is the correct one. To the cryptographer looking at it, it would look like nonsense. The ONLY way to defeat this type of encryption is to intercept the key.

    Source: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Brute_force_attack

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