World War 3? The Cyberwar for Control of the Internet

Original Post (8 December 2010, 17:15 UTC)

As of this post, a silent war involving thousands and thousands is happening, but it isn’t the war you were expecting. It’s the war around WikiLeaks and Julian Assange (See my previous post, “WikiWhat?“, for more details on that story). Who knew how just how exciting this would turn out to be? It’s a geek’s dream come true!! *excited*

At 16:22 UTC, AnonOps tweeted the following:

As of 16:45 UTC, bother mastercard.com and anonops.net were down:

Paypal has been attacked in the last day or so, as was PostFinance, WikiLeak’s previous bank, but were not bought down, as in Mastercard‘s case and lawyers on both sides of the Assange case have been attacked.

This is the war for the internet baby and you might as well sit back and enjoy it. Massive botnets are attacking each other and the websites mentioned. I ,for one, am getting the popcorn ready 🙂

Read the article that isnpired this post here: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/12/avenging-wikileaks-anonymous-hackers-takes-mastercard-site/

Update 1 (9 December 2010 – 8:00 UTC)

Visa is the next company to feel the wrath of Operation Payback being run by AnonOps. This was at 7:40 UTC

However anonops.net is also experiencing issues of their own, their website is struggling and their Twitter account has been suspended.

Have a look at this YouTube video for MSNBC‘s report on Operation Payback & WikiLeaks:

These articles also shed some light on the matter in more detail:

This is getting more exciting, as there are rumours that twitter.com is next. Will miss it, but it’s so much fun 🙂

Update 2 (9 December 2010 – 15:00 UTC)

The latest buzz today with this was AnonOps releasing their Manifesto as below:

But the very lastest on the internet, is that at 16:00 UTC, Amazon will be targeted for the next DDoS attack and while it may not bring the giant down, it will cause some major bandwidth & financial issues.