Mastercard site down after WL revenge DDoS attacks

[Infohawk]

I do.

That fact isn't as interesting when you're a self-admitted anarchist.

 

[Drift3r]

The rules of democracy include freedom of information. You cannot make a rational decision as a voter when your government hides stuff from you. And when things get really bad and atrocities happen and your country is full of dog shit nationalist right wingers who applaud it, then you REALLY need those things to come out in order to shame them. You cannot have democracy when there is no transparency.

So are you mad that George Washington didn't hand out copies of his battle plan to everyone (including the British) before the Battle of Trent?

Are you also mad that Benjamin Franklin had secret discussions with the British while gaining France's support for the war? Thus limiting the role and influence of the peace negotiations so that the French and Spanish were left out in the cold.

 

[Dissipate]

That fact isn't as interesting when you're a self-admitted anarchist.

True enough.

I don't really have heroes, but I'm a fan of the results of Wikileaks and its supporters. I consider them to be like the Russian political nihilists.

This excellent quote from Russian Nihilist Dmitri Pisarev comes to mind:

Here is the ultimatum of our camp. What can be smashed must be smashed; whatever will stand the blow is sound, what flies into smithereens is rubbish; at any rate, hit out right and left, no harm will or can come of it.

 

[cubby1223]

When you get your clearance, you're expected to divulge everything about your life. Wonder why?

What are you talking about? When you go through security clearance for a job or a position, the things they go through are not made available for everyone in the world to know. How does this have anything to do with your assertion that the fringe nuts will go away once the government becomes "transparent"?

Gosh, I swear the average I.Q. of this forum must be sitting around 50

 

[cubby1223]

Thanks to wikileaks, i learned that the Bush administration pressured Germany not to prosecute CIA operatives who kidnapped an innocent man to be tortured and just dumped him in another country when they found out he was 'nobody'.

If this is the worst thing our country has done, then we are a pretty damn good country.

Look around at the alternatives out there.

And grow up.

 

[cubby1223]

I'm not supporting or disavowing wikileaks or their supporters, what frightens me is the general sense I get that people who are protesting in a non-violent way are being derided as criminals and that folks who disagree with this cause will lash out with ridiculous legislation in response to it. We'll all be made to suffer because of this regardless of the merits or lack thereof of wikileaks and it's supporters. I envision Patriot Act style legislation to govern the internet, the last bastion of truly free speech/expression left in existence.

It's interesting how those in "support" of "the last bastion of truly free speech/expression left in existence" are using DDOS attacks to *suppress* freedom of speech of those who disagree with them.

The internet is so fucking over-rated as an empowering entity. Those who support wikileaks are probably just grouches who spend their lives in their basements shut off from society, and just got temporary excitement in clicking a few buttons. If these "hackers" actually had to do *something* to protest, you can bet the farm every last one of them would do absolutely nothing.

And you really feel like you will be suffering from the fallout of government's reaction? HA!

 

[flexy]

It's interesting how those in "support" of "the last bastion of truly free speech/expression left in existence" are using DDOS attacks to *suppress* freedom of speech of those who disagree with them.

The internet is so fucking over-rated as an empowering entity. Those who support wikileaks are probably just grouches who spend their lives in their basements shut off from society.

Total nonsense. Please look at action and RE-action. If we go down at that level and call this indeed "cyber warfare"...then please look at "who started it"..and why some people face what "consequences".

The hackers and WL supporters are NOT the ones who started suppressing freedom of speech - they did NOT bow down to the government.

I also think that your opinion about the internet as an "empowering entity" is slightly flawed. As someone who owns websites myself i know that a simple outage of only a few hours means MONEY LOST. LOTS OF MONEY.

Do you have an idea how many millions MasterCard, Visa etc. lost from this single one outage? Now add the many voices i heard which actually cancelled their accounts.

By the way..yesterday there was 10.000 (TEN THOUSAND!) hacked credit cards posted on the web. As i understood and read they were hacked from MasterCard ...although i cannot confirm that.

Now tell me that the whole thing is not a HUGE, HUGE hit for Mastercard...

 

[flexy]

DDOSes are dumb in general, but this is pretty dumb in specific in that Mastercard.com is hardly on the same infrastructure that handles actual credit card transactions.

Parts of it ARE. Some kind of payment processing WAS actually disrupted since it was indeed sharing the same resources.

Furthermore...rest assured that we, the general public will NOT get the whole story

Mastercard, Visa etc. will greatly play down whatever attacks and leaks they experience - and you might need to look on "odd" places online to get the whole story.

Again: MC will NEVER tell the general public that it experienced a relatively serious attack with parts of its payment structure compromised - and they will also NOT tell you that yesterday there was lists online with 10.000 hacked credit card numbers PLUS other lists with personal customer data.

 

[Red Dawn]

In an effort to not miss out on the attention the the attention seeking and money grubbing Whore Sarah Payoff is claiming her site was attacked by supporters of Wikileaks

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2010/12/08/palins-website-hit-by-cyber-attack/

 

[jacc1234]

Parts of it ARE. Some kind of payment processing WAS actually disrupted since it was indeed sharing the same resources.

Furthermore...rest assured that we, the general public will NOT get the whole story

Mastercard, Visa etc. will greatly play down whatever attacks and leaks they experience - and you might need to look on "odd" places online to get the whole story.

Again: MC will NEVER tell the general public that it experienced a relatively serious attack with parts of its payment structure compromised - and they will also NOT tell you that yesterday there was lists online with 10.000 hacked credit card numbers PLUS other lists with personal customer data.

10k credit cards leaking is nothing. That number or more can easily be found from a single hacked merchant site. Also, it probably has nothing to do with the DDOS or MC.

 

[cubby1223]

Total nonsense. Please look at action and RE-action. If we go down at that level and call this indeed "cyber warfare"...then please look at "who started it"..and why some people face what "consequences".

The hackers and WL supporters are NOT the ones who started suppressing freedom of speech - they did NOT bow down to the government.

hehehe

And Mastercard did? You do realize the people who run Mastercard have freedoms too.

I also think that your opinion about the internet as an "empowering entity" is slightly flawed. As someone who owns websites myself i know that a simple outage of only a few hours means MONEY LOST. LOTS OF MONEY.

Own? Sitting about twenty feet from me right now is a rack of servers hosting about 40 websites and email services to about 80 local businesses. What are you trying to prove?

The internet is not empowering as these attacks do not bring about big change, they do not bring about awareness, they do not persuade anyone's opinions, they do not bring sympathy. To the vast majority of people, cyberattacks either go unnoticed or treated as a pest that needs to be swatted away.

These attacks are a loss of money for a few people, with *no* gain on the side of the "hackers".

 

[Throckmorton]

Total nonsense. Please look at action and RE-action. If we go down at that level and call this indeed "cyber warfare"...then please look at "who started it"..and why some people face what "consequences".

The hackers and WL supporters are NOT the ones who started suppressing freedom of speech - they did NOT bow down to the government.

I also think that your opinion about the internet as an "empowering entity" is slightly flawed. As someone who owns websites myself i know that a simple outage of only a few hours means MONEY LOST. LOTS OF MONEY.

Do you have an idea how many millions MasterCard, Visa etc. lost from this single one outage? Now add the many voices i heard which actually cancelled their accounts.

By the way..yesterday there was 10.000 (TEN THOUSAND!) hacked credit cards posted on the web. As i understood and read they were hacked from MasterCard ...although i cannot confirm that.

Now tell me that the whole thing is not a HUGE, HUGE hit for Mastercard...

LOL. I like how Julian Assange can't be prosecuted for treason because he's not an American, yet you people expect him to have the right to free speech, facilitated by American companies.

This is the real New World Order. Mass stupidity and anti-government Teabag anarchist hysteria.

 

[DietDrThunder]

Good Job Amazon!

http://money.cnn.com/2010/12/09/technology/amazon_wikileaks_attack/index.htm?source=yahoo_quote

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- The website-attacking group "Anonymous" tried and failed to take down Amazon.com on Thursday. The group's vengeance horde quickly found out something techies have known for years: Amazon, which has built one of the world's most invincible websites, is almost impossible to crash.

Amazon has famously massive server capacity in order to handle the December e-commerce rush. That short holiday shopping window is so critical, and so intense, that even a few minutes of downtime could cost Amazon millions.

5Email Print CommentSo Amazon (AMZN, Fortune 500) has spent years creating and refining an "elastic" infrastructure, called EC2, designed to automatically scale to handle giant traffic spikes. The company has so much spare server capacity, in fact, that it runs a sideline business hosting other websites. Its customers include the New York Times, Second Life, Etsy, Playfish, the Indianapolis 500 and the Washington Post.

Until last week, WikiLeaks was one of Amazon's website-hosting customers. Amazon gave WikiLeaks the boot in the wake of the site's controversial release of a trove secret U.S. State Department documents.

That put Amazon in the crosshairs of Anonymous, a group that originated on image-board site 4chan.com, which organizes swarms to try to crash the websites of those it deems enemies. In the past, Anonymous has taken down several high-profile sites, including those of the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America.

This week, Anonymous launched takedown campaigns against organizations that have shunned the site WikiLeaks. Under the banner "Operation Payback," the Anonymous group successfully crashed Mastercard.com and strained the websites of Visa and PayPal. (Mastercard and Visa's transaction networks -- which run completely independently of their websites -- were unaffected.)

Anonymous makes its attacks not through hacking, but merely by directing a giant traffic surge to the targeted website. That's called a DDoS attack, short for distributed denial-of-service -- and it's hard for most websites to defend against.

But Amazon's entire business model is built around handling intense traffic spikes. The holiday shopping season essentially is a month-long DDoS attack on Amazon's servers -- so the company has spent lavishly to fortify itself.

Anonymous quickly figured that out. Less than an hour after setting its sights on Amazon, the group's organizers called off the attempt. "We don't have enough forces," they tweeted.

Instead, they decided to go hammer PayPal's API, which seems to be holding up fine under the attack.

So click away, holiday shoppers. Amazon's got your back.

 

[flexy]

yet you people expect him to have the right to free speech, facilitated by American companies.

Yes, if someone has compromising information, especially if it concerns politicians, corporates etc. - i would be a strong supporter FOR the release of this information into the public and the media. And you have a problem with that?

(Why do we even need to discus this? Are we in China?)