LAHORE: A group called Anonymous has hit sites that have refused to do business with the controversial whistle-blowing site with a series of distributed denial-of-service attacks.
It mirrors similar attacks aimed at the Wikileaks site. Targets include the Swiss bank that froze founder Julian Assange’s assets and PayPal which has stopped processing donations to Wikileaks. Anonymous is a loose-knit group of hacktivists, with links to the notorious message board 4chan.
A member of Anonymous who calls himself Coldblood told the BBC that “multiple things are being done”. “Websites that are bowing down to government pressure have become targets,” he said. “As an organisation, we have always taken a strong stance on censorship and freedom of expression on the internet and come out against those who seek to destroy it by any means.”
“We feel that Wikileaks has become more than just about leaking of documents, it has become a war ground, the people vs. the government,” he said. So far the denial-of-service attacks (DDoS), which swamp a site with so many requests that it becomes overwhelmed, have failed to take any sites offline although that is not the point of the attack, according to Coldblood.
“The idea is not to wipe them off but to give the companies a wake-up call,” he said. “Companies will notice the increase in traffic and an increase in traffic means increase in costs associated with running a website.”
