WikiLeaks reported a mass attack on Sunday November 28, targeting its main server in Sweden, as it was preparing to release the first cables. On Monday, the site was back on, as it switched to Amazon's cloud computing platform, a service that allows users to rent as many virtual servers as they want. But the next day, Amazon stopped serving WikiLeaks. According to The Seattle Times, Amazon was contacted by a US Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee official who pressured the company to dump the site. The whistleblowing website continued to function on Wednesday from its Swedish servers and published more cables, reaching 612 out of the 250.000 to be released.
The latest cyber-attacks on WikiLeaks make the case for the EU to criminalise the software tools enabling such crimes and for setting up a 24-hour alert system where citizens and companies can flag up attacks, EU home affairs Commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom has said. Commenting in a press conference on about a post she wrote on her personal blog, Ms Malmstrom explained that she gave the WikiLeaks example as an argument for the cyber-crime legislation which is being currently worked on in the European Commission. "I note that the commission has proposed to criminalise botnets, the viruses and malignous software which were apparently used to attack WikiLeaks," the EU commissioner said.
On her blog, Ms Malmstrom wrote that "we have seen how countries like Estonia and Lithuania have been subjected to such attacks. This time it was WikiLeaks. Next time, the target may be the Swedish stock exchange, a nuclear plant or a sensitive patient record at a hospital."
Pressed on the question of state-led attacks, after Republican commentators suggested that the US government ordered the "denial-of-service attacks" in a bid to block the publication of the roughly 250.000 secret US diplomatic cables, Ms Malmstrom said she "can't judge who attacked WikiLeaks" and admitted "it would be very difficult to prove if a state committed an attack."
′State-sponsored attacks number one risk to cyber security′
Recently, in a discussion paper prepared by the EU's anti-terrorism co-ordinator Gilles de Kerckhove, "state-driven or state-sponsored attacks" are identified as the number one risk to cyber security. But EU Com. Malmstrom said, "it would be very difficult to prove if a state committed an attack"
The latest cyber-attacks on WikiLeaks make the case for the EU to criminalise the software tools enabling such crimes and for setting up a 24-hour alert system where citizens and companies can flag up attacks, EU home affairs Commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom has said.
