Assange Prosecutor Website under Attack

Added by Annika L. Krugel on December 11, 2010

The Swedish prosecutor in charge of pursuing WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has had its website attacked by his online supporter, according to news reports.

The malware detection laboratory for Panda Security, PandaLabs, said that the website, aklagare.se, had been brought down by the “cyber hacktivist” group Anonymous.

The attack came as a British judge refused Assange bail over sex crime charges in Sweden. It was a result of a distributed denial of service attack, DDoS, in which a “botnet” of some 500 zombie computers, infected with viruses, simultaneously visited the site, overwhelming the servers and slowing down service, or even causing it go to offline.

Other sites were also affected; PayPal, which last week blocked financial transfers to WikiLeaks, and the Swiss Post Bank, which had closed accounts held by Assange.

ThePayPalBlog.com, on Saturday came under DDoS attack, causing it to go down briefly. It was back up on Tuesday.

The Swiss Post Bank site, PostFinance.ch, was unavailable on Tuesday.

PandaLabs researcher, Sean-Paul Correll, said the Anonymous site, anonops.net, had also come under attack and as a result temporarily went down on Tuesday.

WikiLeaks itself has been forced to change its address and servers since releasing the latest batch of US documents last week.