Bank of America cuts WikiLeaks (Computerworld) services

IDG News Service - Bank of America joins the growing list of the financial and technology companies cut WikiLeaks, a move that comes in the middle of the speculation that denunciation site prepares to disclose information on the services.

"Joins the American actions previously announced by MasterCard, PayPal, Bank Visa Europe and others to discuss no transactions of any type we have reason to believe are destined for the WikiLeaks" the Bank said in a release issued Friday. "" "" "This decision is based on our reasonable grounds to believe that the WikiLeaks can be engaged in activities which are, among other things, incompatible with our internal policies for the treatment of payments," said the Bank.

WikiLeaks, reaction, November 28, caused global controversy with a cache of 250,000 leaks U.S. Embassy cables, was rapid. "Is your company? "business with Bank of America" said the late WikiLeaks twitter message Friday. "Our advice is to place your funds somewhere safer."

Founder of WikiLeaks Julian Assange said in an interview with CNBC Friday as WikiLeaks soon free information about banks. In an interview with the magazine Forbes last month, he said that WikiLeaks was prepared to reveal information about a bank that would show "unethical practices".

In recent interviews, Assange did not name a speficic, but in an interview with IDG News Service Bank last year, he said "we're sitting on 5 GB of Bank of America, one of the drives of the Executive.

At this time, said Assange WikiLeaks was reflecting on how to present data. "This is a difficult problem." We might just dump everything into a single giant zip file, but we know for a fact that has a limited impact. To make an impact, it must be easy for people to dive and it looks and something to it. »

Recent publication of the Wikileaks from U.S. Embassy cables has aroused the wrath of Governments and a rash of attacks between WikiLeaks detractors and supporters.

In the midst of controversy, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has its servers WikiLeaks to break the rules of the service on the content which may injure others. Institutions PayPal and credit card payment for WikiLeaks service was interrupted.

Decline in services to financial institutions financial institutions have been affected and then with pro-WikiLeaks denial of service (DDoS) attacks.

Life Assange, meanwhile, has been discussed. Assange is wanted for questioning by the Swedish Government concerning the allegations of sexual assault of two women-related incidents in the month of August in the country. He was arrested earlier this month at the United Kingdom after the Sweden launched an arrest warrant. The United Kingdom High Court ruled that the Assange could be released on £ 240,000 ($ défrichait) on bail pending a hearing for the extradition of January.

U.s. Office of the Attorney General investigates Assange towards the release of the U.S. Embassy cables but has not yet charged.

Reproduced with the permission of IDG.net. History of copyright 2010 International Data Group. All rights reserved.

Reprisals by pro-WikiLeaks DDoS overstated, says expert (Computerworld)

Computerworld - all titles to the contrary, attacks of hacktivist WikiLeaks against visa, MasterCard, PayPal and others last week were relatively small and disorganized, says one security expert.

"Despite the press attacks received, they were small potatoes,", said Craig Labovitz, Chief Scientist at Arbor Networks in Chelmsford, Massachusetts, and an authority on the security infrastructure of the Internet.

In a long post earlier this week, Labovitz on scale Arbor blog and refinement of the pro-WikiLeaks distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS) to 5 000 in 2010 confirmed DDoS attacks.

Conclusion of the Labovitz: WikiLeaks attacks were "trivial".

"I call it equivalent to strike a French trucker, cyber" Labovitz said in an interview Thursday. "This is certainly not a war, as claimed by some titles. It was a form of protest, but whose collateral damage. »

DDoS attacks aimed at sites owned by Amazon.com, MasterCard, PayPal and the transaction of payment Switzerland firm PostFinance, apparently in retaliation after each end accounts WikiLeaks or shot stopper WikiLeaks services. Similar attacks from Senator Joseph Lieberman (Conn-I) and Sarah Palin, the former Governor of Alaska sites. Both had blown WikiLeaks to release a trove of confidential cables from the u.s. Department of State at the end of last month.

But when Labovitz against these statistics compiled by Arbor - society provides anti-DDoS technologies to approximately 75% of the world - Internet service providers found wanting WikiLeaks campaigns.

Labovitz, tour of the initial attacks that targeted WikiLeaks itself nor later retaliatory strikes were DDoS floods massive or tune application-level attacks.

"The type of queries [application level] LOIC were rudimentary," said Labovitz, referring to a free tool called low orbit Ion Cannon, many pro-WikiLeaks attack used participants. "A sophisticated attack uses order queries, all right API calls bogs in the system. Hacktivist attacks showed no trace of either.

Nor were these massive attacks.

Labovitz said that the attacks of pro-WikiLeaks generated peak on 5Gbit/sec of traffic aimed at targets, although in 50Gbit/sec Arbor followed in several other flood DDoS attacks this year and only a fraction of the almost 70Gbit/sec view larger until 2010 attack.

And while LOIC more than 100,000 copies were downloaded last week, Labovitz said that the Arbor data showed that the maximum number of attackers WikiLeaks simultaneous retaliation is only in the hundreds, not thousands.

"The number of source what ip observed in revenge fallen WikiLeaks late middle attacks" or 5,000 DDoS attacks made Beaver validated last year, he said on the ticket blog.

Labovitz, who suggested that bases tried to recruit large networks of botnets, these collections of compromised computers were not actually used.

But while WikiLeaks attacks were easily blocked by most of the targets, this does not mean attack DDoS are not a serious threat to the Internet.

"The majority of attacks that see us can be treated," said Labovitz, but there are professionals with financial reasons that take a long time and money in very sophisticated DDoS attacks. "He hesitated to assign the precise reasons for such attacks top range, although some, he said, were clear extortion against ISPs and enterprises.

"While the WikiLeaks and reprisal attacks do not represent the beginning of"cyberwar"... the tendency of the militarization of the Internet and used DDoS as means of protest, censorship and attacked political concern," he wrote on the blog of Arbor "DDoS fuelled by the growth of professional opponents, massive Botnets and increasingly more sophisticated attack tools computer networks poses a real danger for the network and our growing dependence on the Internet."

Gregg Keizer covers Microsoft issues security, Apple, Web browsers and General technology breaking news for Computerworld. Follow Gregg on Twitter at @ gkeizer or you subscribe to flux RSS de Gregg . Her address is gkeizer@computerworld.com.

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