Okay Geek Farm
PayPal is down and under DDoS attacks by 4Chan in the name of WikiLeaks
Well, the Wikileaks riot has officially started, namely because 4Chan has jumped into the scene and is pummeling websites left and right — Tumblr.com may have been just a test. Dubbed “OpPayback”, Anonymous (for new folks “Anonymous” are the warriors of 4Chan) has started successful attacks on Visa.com, and have now moved onto the meat of the operation, PayPal — but why has this riot broken out?
Just to get you caught up
A short while back, Wikileaks leaked 251,287 United States embassy cables, and immediately Wikileaks came under siege due to the highly controversial and potentially dangerous information in the documents. Wikileaks was hit with dozens of DDoS attacks, and a never ending stream of negative press in hopes of erasing the documents that were leaked. Skip ahead a week or so, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, was arrested without bail in London on a Sweden Warrant, and Wikileaks was basically banned from US internet, and took refuge in other countries.
Skip ahead to this moment and the people supporting Wikileaks have decided to protest, and make some noise in the name of WikiLeaks. 4Chan is a supporter of Wikileak’s controversial efforts, and have decided to pound our most important websites with DDoS attacks — which has become a part of OpPayback.
Their latest target is PayPal, and it isn’t going over very well with the internet — status messages, Tweets and updates are bursting at the seams, and the uproar has signified one of the most sudden online wars that will have major effects on every day life. Paypal payments have been stopped, and eBay auctions have turned into ghost towns.
So what now?
Well, PayPal is down, Visa.com is crippled and Mastercard is left picking up the pieces, so the path of destruction could lead anywhere. Currently it seems that Paypal is trying to rout to German servers, but it still looks grim. This will have a serious impact on the financial segment of the web, and will open a door for more hackers to jump in and mess stuff up.
It’s fun for a while, but then it gets to a point where it makes little sense and affects our cause negatively.
Brandon Davenport
It seems that Paypal is back up, but for how long?
