Internet war

In support of Wikileaks, an army of hackers has declared war.  Their first battle is to attack Mastercard and Visa.

Hackers have declared an Internet war in support of WikiLeaks, with groups of anonymous attackers disabling major credit card websites in retaliation for denying service to the controversial website.

The group, going by the name “Anonymous,” rallied its supporters in a Twitter post Wednesday, calling for them to get their “weapons” ready to attack the Visa website for the next phase of “Operation Payback.”

The same group claimed responsiblity for crippling the MasterCard website for much of the day Wednesday using denial of service attacks, which overwhlem a website with data requests.

Both Visa and MasterCard have stopped processing donations to WikiLeaks as the online organization faces tremendous political pressure for publishing secret U.S. diplomatic cables.

Wikileaks released a cable Wednesday showing that in February 2010 U.S. officials lobbied Russia on behalf of MasterCard and Visa to ensure that a proposed Russian law did not adversely affect their businesses.

There are now more than 1,000 Internet “mirror sites” hosting WikiLeaks content, which is more than double the number of sites that existed days ago.

via VOA | Hackers Set Sights on Visa in Fight for WikiLeaks | News | English.