Anonymous Cyber-Activist Group Launches New Attacks in Defense of WikiLeaks Founder

- Cyber-activist group launches DDoS attacks on PayPal for ceasing to process donations to WikiLeaks, and the PostFinance.ch bank for freezing Julian Assange's bank account

- Anonymous announces series of new targets for the next few days, including Twitter for allegedly censoring WikiLeaks discussions

News provided by

Panda Security

Dec 07, 2010, 02:47 ET

ORLANDO, Fla., Dec. 7, 2010 /PRNewswire/ -- According to PandaLabs, the anti-malware laboratory at Panda Security, Anonymous, the cyber-group responsible for launching a series of attacks against copyright societies worldwide last October, is now performing further attacks in defense of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Anonymous has circulated a statement indicating that it has no affiliation with WikiLeaks or its founder, but shows its full support of Assange, as "we fight for the same reason: Transparency and anti-censorship".

So far PandaLabs has detected three attacks. The first two hit PayPal and its blog for suspending donations to WikiLeaks, and have resulted in over 8 hours of total downtime. Image available at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/panda_security/5240326527/

The third attack, however, affected the PostFinance.ch bank for freezing Assange's account and has already resulted in more than 11 hours of downtime. Users even turned to Twitter to ask cyber-activists to stop the attack for at least 10 minutes to be able to use the bank's online services. Image available at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/panda_security/5240324133/

Finally, last Monday, the Anonymous group's own website suffered a series of DDoS attacks that rendered it inactive for some hours. Anonymous is planning to continue with its campaign in favor of Julian Assange by attacking any institution that tries to silence or discourage WikiLeaks. The group has already threatened Twitter for allegedly suppressing WikiLeaks discussions (tweets with the hashtag #wikileaks), even though these threats have not yet materialized.

We will follow up this story very closely. Visit the PandaLabs blog for the latest information about the attacks.

About PandaLabs

Since 1990, PandaLabs, Panda Security's malware research laboratory, has been working to detect and classify malware in order to protect consumers and companies against new Internet threats. To do so, PandaLabs uses Collective Intelligence, a cloud-based proprietary system that leverages the knowledge gathered from Panda's user community to automatically detect, analyze and classify the more than 63,000 new malware strains that appear every day. This automated malware classification is complemented through the work of an international team with researchers specialized each in a specific type of malware (viruses, worms, Trojans, spyware and other attacks) to provide global coverage. Get more information about PandaLabs and subscribe to its blog news feed at: http://www.pandalabs.com.

Follow Panda on Twitter: http://twitter.com/panda_security and on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/PandaSecurity.

SOURCE Panda Security