A screen shot of the Swedish Prosecution Authority website, Aklagare.se
(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Anonymous, the group of pro-WikiLeaks hackers, has brought down the website of the Swedish Prosecution Authority (www.aklagare.se) Tuesday following the authority’s announcement that it intends to appeal against a British judge’s decision to grant bail to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
The Swedish website went offline for nearly 11 hours on Tuesday, marking the latest in an ongoing series of attacks by Anonymous.
The group has been attacking the websites of companies and governments which it views as acting against WikiLeaks, including Mastercard, Visa, PayPal, PostFinance and Moneybookers.
Assange recently called out to supporters of WikiLeaks to protect the site from these companies, referring to them as “instruments of US foreign policy”.
At least three hackers have been arrested this week in connection to the Anonymous attacks as authorities.
Meanwhile, WikiLeaks’ primary site, WikiLeaks.org, was restored last Friday. Now hosted by US-based Silicon Valley Web Hosting, the domain was offline for a week after its DNS provider EveryDNS disconnected its services.
Traffic to the WikiLeaks.org domain was being redirected to wikileaks.info, a site which online security firm Spamhaus said contained links to Russian cybercriminals and could potentially carry viruses.
However, WikiLeaks.info denied these allegations in an online statement, stating that it monitors the WikiLeaks.info site and “can guarantee that there is no malware on it.”
It adds: “WikiLeaks has been pulled from big hosters like Amazon. That’s why we are using a ‘bulletproof’ hoster that does not just kick a site when it gets a letter from government or a big company.”
The thousands of exposed US diplomatic cables is replicated on over 2,100 WikiLeaks mirrored sites, which are listed here.
Sweden authorities have asked Britain to hand over Assange for questioning over sexual assault allegations involving two women in Stockholm last August, but WikiLeaks supporters claim that the move is politically motivated. The decision of the appeal will be announced Thursday.
Assange’s attorney Mark Stephens told the BBC that more than half of the £200,000 bail has been raised by WikiLeaks supporters, including filmmakers Michael Moore and Ken Loach.
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