The last few days wikileaks has been one of the hottest topics of the Internet world.
After WikiLeaks released a secret cable listing sites worldwide, that the U.S. considers critical to its national security, it was targeted by DDoS attacks.
A few days later Julian Assagne was accused for the rape of two Swedish women. Many people think that both the DDoS attacks and the rape accusation are coordinated by the U.S. In addition U.S. government persuaded Paypal to stop taking payments from wikileaks. While visa and MasterCard also stopped accepting payments from wikileaks.
All the above facts made many people suspicious and worried about the freedom of speech in the World Wide Web. As a result the Operation Payback group is targeting principals it considers responsible for the wikileaks hunt and Assagne’s (fake!?) rape case.
Since today the following websites has been attacked:
| PostFinance | postfinance.ch | 2010-12-06 |
| Swedish Prosecution Authority | aklagare.se | 2010-12-07 |
| EveryDNS | everydns.com | 2010-12-07 |
| Joseph Lieberman | lieberman.senate.gov | 2010-12-08 |
| MasterCard | mastercard.com | 2010-12-08 10:30 UTC |
| Borgstrom and Bostrom | advbyra.se | 2010-12-08 |
| BILD (not confirmed) | bild.de | 2010-12-08 19:30 UTC |
| Visa | visa.com | 2010-12-08 21:00 UTC |
| Sarah Palin | sarahpac.com | 2010-12-08 |
| Paypal | paypal.com | 2010-12-09 02:50 UTC |
| Amazon | amazon.com | 2010-12-09 23:00 UTC |
Those attacks are made using a “voluntary” bot-net. Users can join the bot-net with their PC using a modified version of the Low Orbit Ion Cannon (LOIC). Actually running this modified LOIC makes your PC a bot of the bot-net and (rumors say) 10 hacktivists (probably the coordinators) set the bot-net to target a site. The site to be targeted is chosen after conversations in irc://irc.anonops.net at channel #OperationPayback. Any user disagreeing with an attack can log out from the bot-net at any time.
