"Operation Avenge Assange," referring to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

Thousands join DDoS attacks

Some of the more militant elements on the Internet clearly took him at his word. A group calling itself Anonymous put the quote at the top of a webpage entitled "Operation Avenge Assange," referring to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

Online collective Anonymous appears to be using social networking site Twitter to coordinate attacks on websites belonging to entities it views as trying to silence WikiLeaks.

Targets have included MasterCard, Visa and a Swiss bank. All blocked payments to WikiLeaks on apparent U.S. pressure.

The Swedish government website and Swedish prosecutors behind Assange's arrest in London for extradition and questioning over sex allegations were also hit. Some WikiLeaks supporters view the accusations as politically motivated

"The first serious infowar is now engaged," former Grateful Dead lyricist, founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation John Perry Barlow told his followers on Twitter last week. "The field of battle is WikiLeaks. You are the troops."

Pro-WikiLeaks cyber army gains strength; thousands join DDoS attacks. Volunteers download attack tool, organizers recruit hacker botnets, say researchers.

"One of the more potentially powerful groups to throw in its support is the website 4chan, and its some of its members that are collectively known as Anonymous. The group that is either famous or infamous depending on your point of view, have begun a new campaign to support WikiLeaks and its creator that they are calling “Operation Avenge Assange”.

Operation Avenge Assange is a systematic attack that will target groups that Anonymous has deemed to have essentially treated Assange unfairly. The first target on the list is PayPal, which reports that cyber attacks have already begun." - Source: digitaltrends.com


The retaliatory attacks by pro-WikiLeaks activists are growing in strength as hackers add botnets and thousands of people download an open-source attack tool, security researchers said today.

In recent days, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks have been launched against several sites, including those belonging to Amazon, MasterCard, PayPal and the Swiss payment transaction firm PostFinance, after each terminated WikiLeaks accounts or pulled the plug on services.

As of Thursday, WikiLeaks had posted the full text of more than 1,200 leaked U.S. State Department cables from its trove of over 250,000 messages.

Most of those participating in the attacks are using the LOIC (Low Orbit Ion Cannon) DDoS tool, said researchers with Imperva and Sophos.

The open-source tool, which is sometimes classified as a legitimate network- and firewall-stress testing utility, is being downloaded at the rate of about 1,000 copies per hour, said Tal Be'ery, the Web research team lead at Imperva's Application Defense Center.

"Downloads have soared in the last two days," said Be'ery in an interview. As of 4 p.m. ET, more than 44,000 copies of LOIC had been downloaded from GitHub.

LOIC has become the DDoS tool of choice in the pro-WikiLeaks attacks because users can synchronize their copies with a master command-and-control server, which then coordinates and amplifies the attacks.

Dutch Arrest 16-year-old Related to WikiLeaks Attacks. Dutch authorities arrested a 16-year-old boy on Wednesday in relation to the cyberattacks against Visa, MasterCard and PayPal, which were aimed at punishing those companies for cutting off services to WikiLeaks. The boy was arrested in The Hague, and he will be arraigned before a judge on Friday in Rotterdam, according to a press release from the Netherlands' Public Prosecution Service. The boy, whose computer equipment was seized, has allegedly confessed to taking part in the attacks.

The Public Prosecution Service said he is likely part of a larger group of hackers.

The arrest follows a series of distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks aimed at websites that have been critical of WikiLeaks, which has been releasing portions of 250,000 secret U.S. diplomatic cables since late last month. The attacks seek to overwhelm websites and services by sending streams of meaningless traffic.

Part of the attacks originated in the Netherlands and the main site coordinating the attacks, anonops.net, was hosted in a Dutch data center in Haarlem. The site is down since police actions Wednesday.