Reverse trend – now it's not Wikileaks that goes offline

MasterCard was forced offline for hours by an online assault, led by a group of hackers, to protest against MasterCard’s decision to block WikiLeaks donation. After temporarily taking offline the websites of Post Finance, the Swiss bank which closed WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s account, the same group was responsible to the DDOS (distributed denial of service) attack on MasterCard website.

In contrast to that, with numerous mirrors, Wikileaks now is highly unlikely to be taken offline as before. Some researchers suggest that it has grown in such a scale that, it is nearly immune to takedown. 14 different name servers across 11 different networks make wikileaks.ch a lot less vulnerable than wikileaks.org. In addition to that, about 1000 mirror sites all over the world are mirroring the whole of its content, making it difficult to censor the contents.

Wikileaks’ spokesman Kristinn Hrafnsson, was quoted telling, "you can’t really stop (Wikileaks) unless you want to shut down the Internet."

It was not only MasterCard, another major credit card, Visa, had also stopped serving WikiLeaks. The Ebay company, PayPal, had also refused to accept donation on behalf of Wikileaks. Wikileaks’ Swiss bank account in Post Finance was also frozen to make it hard for the website to survive.

To the dismay of the decision makers, these assaults have actually backfired. Wikileaks has grown stronger with increasing number of supporters all over the world. Even after the arrest of Assange, a group of 5-6 people at WikiLeaks are continuously releasing the secret documents.