First world war in cyberspace over WikiLeaks

The arrest of Julian Assange and loss of WikiLeaks ' major sources of revenue after various online payment services cut off their payment gateways have spawned avengers in the form of the group of 'Anonymous' and what the world is witnessing is arguably the first cyber war on this scale.

The group came into notice after launching Operation Payback on PayPal in response to the e-commerce websites' decision to prevent money transfers to WikiLeaks ' accounts. Anonymous Tweeter feed of December 6 declared that 'Operation Avenge Assange' would start at 7 pm GMT.

The first attack by the group brought down PayPal for several hours. Other websites facilitating online money transfers met a similar fate when they obstructed money transfers to WikiLeaks. The group brought down the websites of Visa, Mastercard and the Swiss Post Office bank for many hours.

Hackers also forced the Swedish government's website offline for several hours.The Aftonbladet daily said the government's official website was offline for a few hours overnight to Thursday.
A 22-year old member of the group, who is not its official spokesperson, talked to BBC and the Guardian and said the group is trying to keep the internet open and free, but governments have been trying to limit freedom on the internet.

"We feel that WikiLeaks has become more than just about leaking of documents, it has become a war ground, the people vs the government ," the member who likes to be addressed as 'Coldblood' told the news agencies. In another interview, a member of the group who was not named by the agency dubbed Assange the 'freespeech martyr.' The member also said the group would extend its campaign to anyone with an anti-WikiLeaks agenda . And promised, Anonymous did not let off the website of US senator Joe Lieberman, often termed as the modern day McCarthy for coercing American companies into withdrawing technical support to WikiLeaks.

EveryDNS, the domain name firm, was also not spared and nor was the website of former Alaska governorSarah Palin, who labeled Assange the equivalent of Osama bin Laden.

In the line of attack by Anonymous are also Claes Borgstrom, the Swedish lawyer appointed to represent the two Swedish women who brought allegations of sex crimes against Assange and the website of the Swedish Prosecution Authority.

The Local, an English language news portal for Sweden and Germany, described how Sweden's justice minister Beatrice Ask became a victim of the ongoing cyber war. Web users who visited the website beatricask.se found themselves directed to WikiLeaks instead.

The primary mode of attack is denial of service, in which the hackers saturate the website with external communications requests leaving it unable to respond to legitimate requests.

The hacker told AFP that they recruit members from everywhere including imageboards , forums, Facebook, Twitter and so on. The members then download the botnet - a collection of software used to trigger the attack by activating all the systems which have downloaded the software to attack one site.

It is believed that the group, which started with 50 members, now has about 4,000 members. Experts believe these numbers because bringing down the Visa website requires about 2,000 attacks as compared to 400 for Mastercard and Anonymous took over both of them, if only for a while.