Just a few days ago their DNS provider (EveryDNS) pulled the plug – apparently due to pressure from the US government, and also because of the ongoing DDoS attacks against WikiLeaks which also effected them.

The latest development is that ‘Anonymous’ has joined the WikiLeaks side of the argument and start attacking those it sees as detrimental to WikiLeaks.

An anonymous, loosely affiliated group that has been responsible for a series of recent Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attacks against entertainment industry Web sites over copyright issues, has started attacking organizations viewed as being hostile to WikiLeaks, says a PandaLabs researcher.

The group, dubbed Anonymous, launched a DDOS attack on Monday that knocked Swiss payment transaction firm PostFinance’s Web site offline. The attack was in apparent retaliation for the firm’s freezing of an account set up by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assanage, PandaLabs threat researcher Sean-Paul Correll said.

The bank’s main Web site was unavailable for several hours but appeared to have been restored by late Monday afternoon. The attack on PostFinance was preceded by one against PayPal’s blog site over the weekend, Correll said. That attack was apparently prompted by PayPal’s decision to cut off money services to WikiLeaks last week.

The PayPal attack began at 4.00 a.m PST on Saturday and resulted in the blog being unavailable for a total of more than 8 hours, Correll said. Meanwhile, anonops.net, a site used by Anonymous to announce their attack plans, came under a massive DDOS attack earlier on Monday, apparently by those opposed to WikiLeaks. In an ironic twist, users attempting to reach the site were being redirected to PostFinance’s Website late Monday evening.

The first target I became aware of was PayPal, due to the fact they froze the WikiLeaks account and ceased processing donations for them. More info on that here:

PayPal Announces It Will No Longer Handle Wikileaks Donations

It seems there are other targets on the list such as the payment processor PostFinance who froze an account set up for Julian Assange the WikiLeaks founder.

A lengthy statement posted on the anonymous group’s Web site listed several organizations that the group claimed had stifled WikiLeaks’ effort to release the documents. “We will find and will attack those who stand against Wikileaks and we will support WikiLeaks in everything they need,” the statement said.

The group said it will offer WikiLeaks an additional site for mirroring the leaked documents. It will also create ‘counter-propaganda’ and organize DDoS attacks on “various targets related to censorship” the group claimed.

Anonymous’ campaign over copyright enforcement issues, Operation:Payback, has resulted in several DDOS attacks being launched against and knocking off sites belonging to the Recording Industry Association of America, the Motion Picture Association of America and others.

In the statement announcing support for Assange, the organizers of Anonymous declared that “Operation:Payback has come out in support of WikiLeaks and has declared war on the entities involved in censoring there information.”

The online tussle between those opposed to WikiLeaks’ campaign and those supporting it highlights how the Internet is increasingly becoming the battleground for all sorts of causes, Correll said.

“People are starting to figure out they can use technology to fight back,” he said. “They have realized they don’t have to just stand in a picket line. This has been going on for a few years, but its getting more organized.”

WikiLeaks has been having a bad time recently, as just before they lost their DNS service – they got kicked off from the Amazon platform.

All in all it seems freedom of speech really isn’t free. If you want to read more about this, there are a LOT of articles – so knock yourselves out.

Source: Network World

Features

• HTTP DDoS with valid requests
• HTTP DDoS with invalid requests (similar to a DC++ attack)
• SMTP DDoS
• TCP connection flood on random port

Some more information and documentation is available here:

Application Layer DDoS Simulator

You can download ddosim v0.2 here:

ddosim-0.2.tar.gz

Or read more here.

Isn’t it amazing in this day and age an entire country can be knocked offline by Denial of Service attacks! You’d have though it wouldn’t happen any more.

I do remember the days when it was fairly easy to take one of the smaller ISPs out in UK, so I guess the infrastructure of some developing countries is still susceptible to serious data floods.

Currently Kyrgyzstan is offline pretty much, even 48 hours after the attack began accessing major media sites is hit and miss.

The central Asian republic of Kyrgyzstan was effectively knocked offline for more than a week by a Russian cybermilitia that continues to flood the country’s internet providers with crippling data attacks, a security expert said.

The attacks, which began on January 18, bear the signature of pro-Russian nationalists believed to have launched similar cyber assaults on the republic of Georgia in August, said Don Jackson, a researcher with Atlanta-based security provider SecureWorks. The attacks on Kyrgyzstan were so potent that most net traffic in and out of the country was completely blocked during the first seven days.

Over the past 48 hours, ISP have managed to mitigate some of the damage by relocating the servers of their biggest customers to different IP address ranges and employing a technique known as source filtering, which is designed to block harmful traffic while still allowing friendly packets through. Some media organizations and government opposition groups in the country of 5.3 million have not been so fortunate.

Believed to have been the work of pro-Russian nationalists, cyber terrorism is getting pretty serious now. These bad guys have some hardcore botnets under their control and can produce some serious traffic.

Apparently the same group attacked Georgia earlier.

The attack on Kyrgyzstan crippled their Internet totally for the first 7 days – that’s some serious traffic!

Representatives from Kyrgyzstan Domain Registration Service and a service known as www.ns.kg didn’t respond to emailed requests for comment. The two services carry about 80 percent of the country’s traffic, Jackson said.

The attacks are the latest example of geopolitical disputes spilling into cyberspace, a trend that’s been growing in the past few years. Web and email traffic in Estonia came to a standstill in May of 2007 after civil unrest over that country’s removal of a Soviet-era memorial was accompanied by attacks on the Baltic nation’s internet infrastructure. Attacks on websites belonging to the Georgian government, on Radio Free Europe and cable television network CNN by Chinese hackers follow a similar pattern.

So-called distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, which flood a victim with so much malicious data it is unable to respond to legitimate requests, aren’t the only weapon in the arsenal of politically motivated hackers. The Israeli Defense Force recently paid a Texas company that specializes in search engine optimization to halt the online backlash generated by its military action in Gaza.

I wonder who will be next, first Georgia and now Kyrgyzstan – I’m sure there will be a new target in the future.

It’s always interesting to see these ‘politically’ motivated attacks and wonder what the people carrying them out really think they are achieving. Do they actually believe denying a whole country it’s Internet will cause any change or any positive action?

I guess they probably just do it because they can, a display of dominance and power.

Source: The Register