WikiLeaks Supporters Likely Behind Massive Internet DDoS Attacks, Assange Possibly In Danger
This past week has been rife with controversial news related to the U.S. election. Of course, there is always an inordinate amount of news during an election cycle, but this week in particular began with some big stories. First, the U.S. officially accused Russia for the infamous DNC hack that outed the Hillary Clinton campaign's manipulation of the democratic primary. That was followed by WikiLeaks tweeting out an array of cryptic hashes in preparation for its latest data dump, and later the Ecuadorian government admitting it cut WikiLeaks’ founder, Julian Assange’s, access to the Internet in retaliation for previous leaks.
Sprinkled amongst all of this drama was the third Presidential debate, during which the candidates tossed about grandiose accusations and technical terms like "WikiLeaks," "hack," and "cyber-attacks," almost as if they knew what they were talking about, but I digress.
Heavily Armed Police 'Appeared' Outside The Ecuadorian Embassy This Morning
(Photo Source: WikiLeaks)
Sprinkled amongst all of this drama was the third Presidential debate, during which the candidates tossed about grandiose accusations and technical terms like "WikiLeaks," "hack," and "cyber-attacks," almost as if they knew what they were talking about, but I digress.
Heavily Armed Police 'Appeared' Outside The Ecuadorian Embassy This Morning
(Photo Source: WikiLeaks)
Things took a turn for the worse this morning, when large parts of the internet were brought down by a massive distributed denial of service attack (DDoS) targeting DNS provider Dyn. If you couldn’t access Amazon, Twitter, and a host of other large sites and on-line services earlier today, this was why you were experiencing an outage and some of your favorite sites may have been offline. Now it seems, if a couple of additional tweets are to be believed, it looks like supporters of WikiLeaks are responsible for this large scale DDoS attack on Dyn.
A little after 5PM, WikiLeaks published this tweet...
Followed a few minutes later by this one...
WikiLeaks is alleging that a group of its supporters launched today’s DDoS attack in retaliation for the Obama administration using its influence to push the Ecuadorian government to limit Assange’s internet access. This alleged action by the Obama admistration, on the surface at least, is claimed to be politically motivated towards silencing damaging leaks against presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.
The earlier tweet reassures supporters that Mr. Assange is still alive, which -- along with a photo of heavily armed police posted this morning -- implies that he may have been (or may still be) in danger, and directly asks said supporters to stop the attack. Engaging directly with its supporters in this way, implies that WikiLeaks knows who is responsible or at the very least has been contacted by the parties involved.
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The earlier tweet reassures supporters that Mr. Assange is still alive, which -- along with a photo of heavily armed police posted this morning -- implies that he may have been (or may still be) in danger, and directly asks said supporters to stop the attack. Engaging directly with its supporters in this way, implies that WikiLeaks knows who is responsible or at the very least has been contacted by the parties involved.
