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WikiLeaks faces strong web attack
By siliconindia
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Wednesday, 01 December 2010, 13:42 IST
New York: The WikiLeaks website faced a powerful Internet-based attack on Tuesday morning, making it inaccessible for hours to users in the US and Europe, reports Economic Times.
The site recovered after switching its main hosting base from Sweden to the U.S. Speaking through a Twitter message, the site said that it is under a ``distributed denial of service attack,'' a method commonly used by hackers to slow down or bring down sites. Amazon.com's server-for-rent which is based in U.S. received the Wikileaks traffic on Tuesday. The site faced a similar attack on Sunday though not as powerful as the one on the Tuesday, but continued to publish stories based on messages leaked from the US State Department in several major newspapers.
The site reported that malicious traffic was coming in at 10 gigabits per second on Tuesday to the server in a typical denial-of-service attack where remote computers commandeered by rogue programs bombard a website with so many data packets that it becomes overwhelmed and unavailable to visitors. This is 28 times higher than the average denial of service attack over the past year according to a study by Arbor Networks. However, Bahnhof, the Swedish Internet company that has been WikiLeaks' main host did not comment at once on Tuesday.
WikiLeaks had given the media outlets prior access to the diplomatic cables to publish in conjunction with their Sunday release on its site. The cables usually classified, offer truthful and unflattering assessments of foreign leaders, ranging from US allies such as Germany and Italy to other nations like Libya, Iran and Afghanistan.
