Hot on the tails of attacking MasterCard, Visa, and PayPal the boys and girls that compose Anonymous are performing a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against Amazon. The funny thing is it doesn’t seem to be working as I can access Amazon without any issue.
I don’t think these guys make the connection that Wikileaks chose to use Amazon’s hosting service specifically because of how robot Amazon’s infrastructure is. Amazon makes their money on people visiting their website and thus have made massive strides in ensuring it’s always accessible. Amazon has been a victim of DDoS attacks before (usually to extort money from Amazon to make the DDoS attack stop) and know how to deal with it. It’s would be like trying to take down Google via a DDoS attack, it won’t work.
This also sends a bad message to web hosts. Basically Anonymous are saying anybody who has hosted Wikileaks and stopped is going to be attacked. Likewise anybody hosting Wikileaks will also be attacked by people from the other side of the issue. Why would any web host be willing to host Wikileaks at all if all they’ll get for their troubles is a big old helping of DDoS. If you want to set a precedence in favor of Wikileaks work to stop the DDoS attacks that are targeting Wikileaks, not a web host who hosted Wikileaks and later terminated the hosting.
I’m still finding the events surrounding Wikileaks far more interesting than the actual leaks themselves.