Supporters of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange gather outside a court in London. Members of 'Anonymous' vowed to extend their cyber campaign to anyone with an 'anti-WikiLeaks agenda'. -- PHOTO: AP
WASHINGTON - The website of credit card giant Visa was unavailable on Wednesday after a cyber attack by members of the hackers group 'Anonymous' angered by its blocking of payments to WikiLeaks.
Visa.com went down instantaneously at 4pm (2100 GMT, 5am Singapore time) as members of Anonymous launched a coordinated cyber attack announced on their Twitter feed #Anon-Operation.
'Operation Payback. TARGET: WWW.VISA.COM :: FIRE FIRE FIRE!!! WEAPONS,' the message said.
Members of 'Anonymous', in an online chat with AFP on Wednesday, vowed to extend their cyber campaign to anyone with an 'anti-WikiLeaks agenda'.
The group has already taken credit for temporarily taking down the websites of Mastercard, PayPal, the Swiss Post Office bank and others with distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.
In a typical DDoS attack, a large number of computers are commanded to simultaneously visit a website, overwhelming its servers, slowing service or knocking it offline completely. -- AFP
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