As MasterCard Worldwide’s website remains inaccessible, its SecureCode payment-verification system seems also to have gone offline.
British online-transaction company SecureTrading said Dec. 8 it has received notice that MasterCard’s SecureCode online card-security protocols are being disrupted.
Ian Cushion, SecureTrading marketing and sales manager, said the payments network notified his company that the transactions were being disrupted. Those outages have been happening throughout the day, he said.
“It doesn’t mean a huge amount for us,” Cushion said. “It’s an outage at the moment.”
Hackers have claimed credit for knocking out mastercard.com in an apparent denial-of-service attack, which is a method of making a website inaccessible by overwhelming it with more access requests than it is designed to handle (
The hackers said the attack was retaliation for MasterCard’s decision to sever its relationship with Wikileaks after Wikileaks published a large number of classified documents (
MasterCard said Dec. 8 that its website was receiving heavy traffic but did not explicitly say it was the target of a denial-of-service attack. A MasterCard spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment on the SecureCode issue, though the company said earlier that the issues with its website did not affect payments.
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