An image from the CableGate site, showing some of the distribution of data among the documents
(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Always-controversial whistleblower website WikiLeaks was reportedly hit with a denial-of-service attack Sunday night, as it prepared for another large-scale release of classified US government documents.
The major news from WikiLeaks on Monday, of course, lay in the content of the documents being released, as the site published thousands of classified US State Department documents, communications with embassies around the world.
WikiLeaks has announced plans to release more than 250,000 of these communications, called cables, over the course of this week, and it began doing so Sunday.
According to reports, the WikiLeaks site was hit by a denial-of-service attack that may have been an attempt to silence the site during a time critical to the issuing of the documents. If so, while the attack succeeded in temporarily taking the site offline, it wasn’t successful in interfering with the release of the documents, the content of which made headlines in newspapers all over the world Monday.
WikiLeaks said via its Twitter account that it was facing a massive denial of service attack. It listed several newspapers that would be publishing the cables “even if WikiLeaks goes down.”
The content of the communications, while still being sifted through, seems to be mostly insight into the current US administration’s feelings about its allies and enemies, stated in the blunt terms of private communications. The fallout seems more likely to be embarrassment, rather than any serious threat.
WikiLeaks made its name as a venue for whistleblowers of all kinds, but has more recently forced its way into the spotlight of major world news by becoming a thorn in the side of the US government. Earlier this year it drew the White House’s outrage with the release of hundreds of thousands of classified documents from the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
According to a report published Monday by The Register, Sunday’s attack on the WikiLeaks site may have been the work of a lone hacker.
The report says a US-based “patriot-hacker,” who goes by the handle The Jester and is known for having attacked jihadist websites in the past, took credit for the attack in a twitter post on Sunday. The claim could just be baseless bravado though, says The Register, and analysis of the attack continues.
Several reports from recent weeks, including several from Netcraft, have tracked the movement of WikiLeaks and its Iraqi War Logs site among several hosting providers, including Amazon’s AWS, Swedish Host PRQ and French hosting provider Octopuce. The DNS moves might have made the sites more or less succeptible to a DDoS attack of the sort suffered Sunday.
Following Sunday’s attack, says The Register, the IP address for WikiLeaks was moved back to Amazon Ireland, and the hosting for the new “CableGate” site was moved back to the US Amazon server that previously hosted the War Logs site.
About Liam Eagle
Liam Eagle has worked as a contributor to the Web Host Industry Review since its inception in 2000, and as editor since 2003. He has been editor of the WHIR's print magazine since its launch. His daily involvement in the gathering and reporting of Web hosting news and his regular interaction with Web hosting leaders gives him an uncommonly broad appreciation of the issues and tends facing the business. Through his WHIR blog, Liam spots Web hosting trends and offers opinions on the industry-wide impacts of major developments and the motivation behind big announcements. Follow him on Twitter @liameagle
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