WikiLeaks Attacked on the Eve of US Diplomatic Cables Leak

November 30, 2010

As it was preparing to begin releasing a massive cache of secret US diplomatic cables, WikiLeaks was hit by a major distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, which temporarily crippled its website.

The announcement was made from the organizations official Twitter account and read: "We are currently under a mass distributed denial of service attack."

The identity of the attacker has not been confirmed, but a hacktivist calling himself th3j35st3r (The Jester in l33t speak), who specializes in attacking jidhadist websites, took credit for the DDoS via his Twitter account.

"www.wikileaks.org - TANGO DOWN - for attempting to endanger the lives of our troops, 'other assets' & foreign relations," he wrote several times.

He also noted that "If I was a wikileaks 'source' right now I'd be getting a little twitchy, if they cant protect their own site, how can they protect a src?"

In a January 2010 interview with security analyst Richard Stiennon, The Jester claimed to be an "ex-soldier with a rather famous unit" who supported Special Forces in Afghanistan and other places.

He publicly declared his disapproval of WikiLeaks' actions in the past and even suggested that he has compromising information about the organization and its activities.

Part of his research into WikiLeaks supposedly touches on the insecurity of its infrastructure and its inability to protect the identity of sources.

He also claims to have a tool capable of launching successful (non-distributed) denial of service attacks with little bandwidth and from a single Linux machine.

Such attacks are actually possible and they rely on tricking Web servers into keeping connections alive for long periods of time. Opening enough such connections will eventually exhaust the server's resources rendering it unresponsive to others.

With or without the DDoS, WikiLeaks did go ahead and published the potentially embarrassing diplomatic cables, which the US government fears could endanger lives and ruin foreign relations.

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