WikiLeaks faces second cyber-attack in three days

WikiLeaks used its Twitter account on Tuesday to reveal that it was under a new cyber attack, just three days after a similar incident which occurred as the website began releasing secret US diplomatic cables.

“We are currently under another DDoS attack,” WikiLeaks said on its official Twitter feed.

DDoS stands for distributed denial of service. Classic DDoS attacks occur when legions of “zombie” computers, normally machines infected with viruses, are commanded to simultaneously visit a website.

Such a massive onslaught can overwhelm servers, slowing service or knocking them offline completely.

A later message on the WikiLeaks Twitter feed said “DDoS attack now exceeding 10 Gigabits a second.”

Jon Karlung, chairman of the Swedish firm Bahnhof which hosts some of WikiLeaks including documents on the Iraq War, confirmed that there was an attack, but the primary target was not its servers in Stockholm.

“We don’t have the primary cable logs (the diplomatic leaks), we don’t host that. But we can see that there is an attack, we can’t see very much but we can see that their servers are very slow,” he said.

Karlung said that WikiLeaks was primarily hosted by US online retailer Amazon, at an address in Seattle.

“An American company is hosting WikiLeaks, that’s fairly remarkable,” said Karlung, adding that WikiLeaks had in recent weeks used France-based servers.

On Sunday, just as it began the release of some 250,000 US embassy cables, WikiLeaks said on Twitter the website had come under a DDoS cyber attack.

But it insisted El Pais, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, The Guardian and the New York Times would go ahead with the publication of the first of such documents even if the WikiLeaks website was down.

WikiLeaks later circumvented the attack by creating a sub-website — http://cablegate.wikileaks.org — as its main website — http://wikileaks.org — became inaccessible after the attack.

As of 1800 GMT on Tuesday, both websites were still online. – AFP