CARD PAYMENT WEBSITES TARGETTED BY WIKILEAKS HACKTIVISTS

Heaven knows I do my damnedest to make this blog topical, relevant and informative, bringing my readers the best of the latest news and developments from the world of credit systems, but it’s not often that ‘My World of Plastic’ features a story so massive and so controversial that it is makes headlines all over the world.

International diplomatic machinations are not my area of expertise, and this kind of political shenanigans is definitely something I would normally avoid like the plague, but in the case of this story, it is hard not to say SOMETHING which is a little bit political, at the very least. 

To summarise the highlights of the story so far:-

·        Wikileaks starts publishing leaked diplomatic cables from several governments, including the US and Great Britain

·        Outcry from US government in the guise of Hilary Clinton that Wikileaks is compromising national security

·        Wikileaks.org shut down

·        Wikileaks moves to a Swiss address, Wikileaks.ch

·        Julian Assange, Wikileaks founder, arrested on sex attack charges

·        Paypal & other payment sites withdraw services from Wikileaks, preventing them receiving donations, on the grounds that they have violated the terms and conditions of their account by carrying out illegal activities

·        Anonymous so-called ‘hacktivists’ target Paypal, Mastercard and Visa because they are considered to be ‘anti Wikileaks

I don’t want to jump feet-first into taking sides on this story.  Admittedly it does seem a bit of a coincidence, to say the least, that Assange is arrested on sex-crime charges just as he hits the headlines for completely unrelated reasons.  On the other hand, a life-time of bitter experience leads me to believe that in this life there is very rarely smoke without fire.  The celebrities who have rushed forward to declare their support for the Wikileaks founder may find themselves embarrassed if the allegations turn out to contain the least grain of truth…It is notoriously difficult and traumatic for rape victims to bring sexual assault complaints to court, let alone achieve a successful outcome. Heaven forbid that the two women involved in this case are demonised if they truly are the innocent victims of a crime.

The main area of concern for this blog is the ability of politically-motivated hackers to disrupt the online services of major credit providers, and the associated security issues to the millions of customers who use these services.  The group Anonymous, which claims to have carried out the attacks, is a shadowy association of hackers with links to the notorious, anarchic, online message board 4chan.   On BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, a 22 year old spokesman for Anonymous, known only as Coldblood, described how people are joining in with the pro-Wikileaks campaign by downloading a botnet tool.  This signs them up to a so-called botnet, an army of machines that can then launch cyber attacks against the payment websites.

The attacks are known as distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS), which means that the pay sites are bombarded  with requests generated by the botnets until they are unable to cope with the volume of traffic, and fall over.

There have been reported problems with payments sites including Paypal, Visa and MasterCard.  MasterCard has acknowledged a service disruption with its SecureCode authentication service, but the true scale of the problem remains unclear.