Anonymous Vows Revenge For Wikileaks And Demonoid Blackouts
Wikileaks sites remain down, as does Demonoid, and Anonymous isn’t happy
Anonymous has said it will not take lightly this week’s actions against Wikileaks and Demonoid, one of the world’s oldest torrent-tracking websites.
Wikileaks sites remain down today, including the main portal, wikileaks.org, and many of its mirror sites which are spread around the world, such as wikileaks.de in Germany. Julian Assange’s organisation claims to have been hit by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. The websites have been down for almost a week now.
Subsequently, an organisation going by the name of @AntiLeaks on Twitter claimed to be behind the DDoS. “Wikileaks survives through donations that pay for their cyber terrorism and Assange’s legal defense. We will continue to enforce a blockade on Wikileaks and it’s [sic] supporters whom attempt to raise donations on it’s [sic] behalf,” the account holder tweeted.
A real hit?
In response, this morning one of Anonymous’ most-followed Twitter accounts, @Anon_Online, tweeted: “This means #War.”
A number of onlookers have suggested Wikileaks could just be looking for attention, using the DDoS as a way of gaining sympathy, but André Stewart, president international at Corero Network Security, said it appeared to be a genuine attack.
“What is interesting is how the attack not only targeted Wikileaks, but also the donation portal, ‘Justice for Assange’, and affiliates websites, showing that this attack was not a flash in the pan, but a targeted DDoS attack against Wikileaks,” Stewart said.
“Due to the highly organised nature of the attack it is unlikely to have been an individual who has carried out the attack.”
Meanwhile, Anonymous has issued a clarion call to exact revenge upon the authorities who shut down Demonoid. Earlier this week, Ukrainian law enforcement raided the data centre that hosted Demonoid’s servers and took the site offline.
An apparent release from the hacktivist collective claimed the raid on Demonoid was timed to coincide with the first trip of first vice prime minister Valeriy Khoroshkovsky to the US on the agenda of copyright infringement. “This implies that the attack against Demonoid was a preplanned operation and a deliberate and malicious attack against Internet freedom,” the message read.
“We will not tolerate this. We will take direct actions against you and your criminal friends until you realize the crimes you’ve committed and restore our beloved Demonoid.”
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