The latest WikiLeaks hullaballoo intensified this week as Mastercard and other groups' websites were hit with distributed denial of service attacks by hackers targeting companies that withdrew services from the whistle-blowing site, the BBC reported.

Mastercard had stopped processing payments to WikiLeaks, prompting the attack by a group of "hacktivists" called Anonymous, according to the BBC. The group said it also targeted PayPal, which stopped processing donations to the whistle blower site as well as the site of Swedish prosecutors in the legal case against Julian Assange, WikiLeaks founder, who was arrested this week.

A PayPal spokesman said it suspened the WikiLeaks account because the U.S. State Department had written to WikiLeaks telling them that their activities were illegal.

A member of Anonymous, called Coldblood, told the BBC that the purpose of the attacks was not to disable sites. "The idea is not to wipe them off but to give the companies a wake-up call," he said. "Companies will notice the increase in traffic and an increase in traffic means increase in costs associated with running a website."

The hackers were winding down the DDoS attacks to focus on "other methods which are more focused on supporting Wikileaks and making sure the Internet stays a free and open place" Coldblood said.

FastCompany's Kit Eaton notes that such digital activism can have a large impact: "These moves highlight that digital protests are getting smarter, and can potentially have significant effects on businesses capability to operate, in an age where more and more of our work is carried out online," Eaton writes. "MasterCard's website being taken down in a DDoS attack will cost the company, and although the amount of cash is probably paltry, the threat behind Anonymous's action is clear."

For more:
- see the BBC article
- see Kit Eaton's post at FastCompany

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