Wikileaks.com Hit by DDoS Attack and DNS Server Fire

DDoS Attack Quickly Rocketed Traffic to 500Mbps

February 2008 - Wikileaks.com, a Web site that leaked "anonymous, untraceable, uncensorable" publications, has been experiencing hard times. The Web site suffered a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, a fire and a temporary restraining order. All of these strikes came after the Web site had leaked some documents regarding some off-shore trust structures in the Cayman Islands.

The first thing that struck Wikileaks.com was a powerful DDoS attack, targeting the company's Domain Name Service (DNS) servers. Under the control of an unknown cyber criminal, a network of thousands of enslaved computers simultaneously sent huge amounts of requests to the Web site's DNS servers. The bogus traffic from the DDoS attack reached peaks of 500Mbps and quickly flooded the DNS servers, bringing the whole Web site down.

After the DDoS attack ended, the Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) that supported the DNS servers caught fire. The DNS servers were located at PRQ Inet, the Swedish co-location hosting company. Some suspect a link between the DDoS attack and the DNS server fire, although this still remains unknown.

The third hit was a permanent injunction granted in the California Northern District Court in San Francisco, California, to Bank Julius Baer, a Swiss Bank. The Web site leaked hundreds of documents that showed offshore tax evasion and money laundering activities. The people exposed by the leaked documents were wealthy and politically sensitive clients.

Source: WikiLeaks

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