WikiLeaks website under cyberattack

WikiLeaks, the controversial document-sharing organization responsible for leaking classified U.S. documents, has been under sustained online attack for well over a week, The Associated Press reported.
 
The website has come under assault from a continued distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. WikiLeaks’s servers have been receiving so much junk traffic from the Internet — over 10 gigabits per second, according to WikiLeaks’s Twitter account — that they have been overwhelmed.
 

The attack has also knocked out several WikiLeaks affiliated sites, according to MSNBC.
 
A group calling itself “Anti Leaks” has claimed responsibility. In a statement linked to from the group’s Twitter account on Aug. 8, the leader, one self-styled “DietPepsi,” claimed that the group was made up of “young adults, citizens of the United States of America,” and that they were “not doing this to call attention to ourselves.”
 
The statement went on to say that they were alarmed at WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s attempt to seek political asylum in Ecuador. However, the country does have an extradition treaty with the United States.
 
Anti Leaks denied any connections with the U.S. government.
 
“We find the speculation that we are not behind these attacks and/or that we are CIA/NSA/FBI or even wikileaks [sic] themselves to be downright comical,” Anti Leaks said in another statement.
 
The hacker group Anonymous, a nebulous coterie that has strongly supported WikiLeaks in the past, fought back by setting up alternate methods of reaching the site, including an anonymous network and several mirror sites not yet taken offline by Anti Leaks.

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