Mastercard, Visa Down: Anonymous Attack, Operation Avenge Assange

One of the more potentially powerful groups to throw in its support is the website 4chan, and its some of its members that are collectively known as Anonymous.  The group that is either famous or infamous depending on your point of view, have begun a new campaign to support WikiLeaks and its creator that they are calling “Operation Avenge Assange”.

Operation Avenge Assange is a systematic attack that will target groups that Anonymous has deemed to have essentially treated Assange unfairly.  The first target on the list is PayPal, which reports that cyber attacks have already begun.

At about 1 p.m. Visa.com was unreachable. Users trying to access the website were informed by their browsers that it was unavailable or could not be found, or they timed out.

At about the same time, a group of hackers going by the name Anonymous said on Twitter that they were responsible for the shutdown, which they called "Operation: Payback."

Its tweet read:

TARGET: WWW.VISA.COM :: FIRE FIRE FIRE!!! WEAPONS http://bit.ly/e6iR3X ::: SET YOUR LOIC TO irc.anonops.net ::: #DDOS #PAYBACK #WIKILEAKS

And shortly thereafter, another tweet:

http://isitup.org/www.visa.com IT'S DOWN! KEEP FIRING!!! #DDOS #PAYBACK #WIKILEAKS

A spokesman for Mastercard confirmed that the company’s Web site was brought down as a result of “a concentrated effort to flood our corporate Web site with traffic and slow access,” but said that card transactions were not compromised. The company, he said, was making concerted efforts to get its site back up, and security teams were working to prevent further outages. The initial decision to deny service to WikiLeaks, he said, was “Mastercard’s alone,” and was not made under government pressure.

A PalPal representative confirmed a series of attacks, but said that while the Website had been slowed, it remained “fully operational.”

A 22-year-old spokesman, who wished to be known only as "Coldblood", told the Guardian that the group – which is about a thousand strong – is "quite a loose band of people who share the same kind of ideals" and wish to be a force for "chaotic good".

There is no real command structure in the group, the London-based spokesman said, while most of its members are teenagers who are "trying to make an impact on what happens with the limited knowledge they have". But others are parents, IT professionals and people who happen to have time – and resources – on their hands.

The group has gained notoriety for its attacks on copyright-enforcement agencies and organisations such as the Church of Scientology.

Perpetrators of DoS attacks typically target sites or services hosted on high-profile web servers such as banks, credit card payment gateways, and even root nameservers. The term is generally used with regards to computer networks, but is not limited to this field, for example, it is also used in reference to CPU resource management.[1]

One common method of attack involves saturating the target machine with external communications requests, such that it cannot respond to legitimate traffic, or responds so slowly as to be rendered effectively unavailable. In general terms, DoS attacks are implemented by either forcing the targeted computer(s) to reset, or consuming its resources so that it can no longer provide its intended service or obstructing the communication media between the intended users and the victim so that they can no longer communicate adequately.