Wikileaks Gets Hacked

truthdig.com

Posted on Nov 28, 2010

Wikileaks, the website that has provided damning classified material on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, has announced it is currently under attack by a denial of service attack as the site prepares to release another set of secret U.S. documents.

Wikileaks is under a mass distributed denial of service attack, meaning that hackers are using multiple machines to persistently request information from Wikileak’s web server, essentially blocking the capacity for the Wikileaks site to service other users. —JCL

The BBC:

Whistle-blowing website Wikileaks says it is under attack from a computer-hacking operation, ahead of a release of secret US documents.

“We are currently under a mass distributed denial of service attack,” it says on its Twitter feed.

It adds that several newspapers will go ahead and publish the documents released to them by Wikileaks even if the site goes down.

Read more

columbia.edu

A “denial of service” attack involves flooding the target Web site with requests for information, thus overloading the site’s server.