Credit card giant Mastercard’s website is down after being hacked by pro-WikiLeaks activists angry at the company’s decision to stop taking donations for the whistleblowing site.
A group called ‘Anonymous’, which has been linked to popular internet forum 4chan, disabled the www.mastercard.com website today using a ‘distributed denial of service’ (DDOS) attack.
They triumphantly announced their actions on their Operation Payback twitter feed, stating: ‘There are some things WikiLeaks can’t do. For everything else, there’s Operation Payback.’
Mastercard announced on Monday that it was no longer processing donations to wikileaks, claiming the site is engaged in illegal activity.
Other finance companies on the hackers’ hit list include Swiss bank PostFinance and payment company PayPal.
DDOS attacks involve flooding a site with requests so that it cannot cope, and are illegal.
Well done Anonymous, and get PayPal for me!
DDoS is not the same thing as hacking.