Wired.com: WikiLeaks Attacks Reveal Surprising, Avoidable Vulnerabilities

Due to all the commotion surrounding it I decided to finally visit the Wikileaks website on Friday the 3rd of December. As it turned out it was down due to a new DoS attack apparently aimed at the DNS provider, EveryDNS. Of course that did not stop me from looking at the cache that Google keeps of all sites available through their search engine.

It seems that after publishing a new document surrounding diplomatic cables between embassies around the world, somebody or probably some government decided that this was too much. Of course to hack the website was not too complicated. Wikileaks used a free DNS provider which is extremely unstable and it resulted in a crash of many servers holding key information that the site supported. After this short-lived incident Wikileaks switched to Amazon’s EC2 cloud-based data-storage service that almost immediately booted the server due to violation of its terms and conditions. It would seem as if the site could not catch a break until the very morning of this day when it suddenly reappeared as if nothing happened.

It would seem they did this through a series of donations obtained as leverage from their twitter account.

"Rather than tweeting the IP addresses of WikiLeaks hosts, which would allow visitors to continue to reach the site uninterrupted, WikiLeaks initially used the outage to encourage donations, tweeting instead: “WikiLeaks.org domain killed by US everydns.net after claimed mass attacks KEEP US STRONG https://donations.datacell.com/”

Normally I would applaud their defiance against the government but using such weak website protections would seem as if they wanted to just to get their donations. There is no proof in my claim but its an awful set of coincidences. It also seems that Wikileaks got their hands on some very sensitive information that the government does not want anybody to know. The site itself is nothing to be proud of since there about 200 thousand documents and no summary for any of them. I don't think everyone is going to go through them just for some conspiracy stories.

Whatever its purpose one thing is certain. WIkileaks has decided to defy order and put forth freedom of speech in a new way. And this is something to be proud of and benefit from. I also urge all of you to check out the wired.com websites since it has enormous amounts of news both scientific and not.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/12/wikileaks-domain/