MasterCard Worldwide and a Swiss bank that attempted to cut ties with Wikileaks apparently are feeling the wrath of Operation Payback, a group of hackers claiming to have shut down both company’s websites.
The websites appear to have been hit by a denial-of-service attack, which blocks public access by overwhelming a site with more traffic than it is designed to handle.
In an e-mail, MasterCard said it was experiencing “heavy traffic” at mastercard.com. “We are working on this to restore normal speed of service,” the company said.
MasterCard said Dec. 7 that it was in the process of suspending payments to Wikileaks. It is among several companies that have been attempting to cut ties to Wikileaks and its founder Julian Assange after Wikileaks exposed thousands of classified documents (
The website of one of the largest retail-banking companies in Switzerland, PostFinance, which closed an account Assange held, was made inaccessible, according to media reports.
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Visa Europe and eBay Inc.’s PayPal payments unit also have said they are suspending the accounts for Wikileaks. Their websites remained accessible at deadline.
Assange was arrested after turning himself in to British police Dec. 7 for a Swedish arrest warrant for alleged sex crimes.
The website of the Swedish prosecutor’s office also was shut down, according to a statement from the agency, which said it was “impossible to get into our site due to overload” from Tuesday night until Wednesday morning.
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