Wikileaks comes under hack attack

By Ben Hurst on Nov 30, 10 07:36 PM

The WikiLeaks website came under another powerful internet-based attack today making it inaccessible for hours.

The site appeared to have responded by switching its main hosting base from Sweden to the US, making it available again.

The site, which distributed masses of US diplomatic documents on Sunday, said that it was under a "distributed denial of service attack," a method commonly used by hackers to slow down or bring down sites.

The site, which is devoted to releasing anonymously submitted documents, also came under attack on Sunday, but today's appeared to be more powerful.

In a typical denial-of-service attack, remote computers commandeered by rogue programs bombard a website with so many data packets that it becomes overwhelmed and unavailable to visitors. Pinpointing the culprits is difficult.

WikiLeaks said the malicious traffic was coming in at 10 gigabits per second, which would make it a relatively large effort.

Sunday's attack did not stop the publication of stories based on messages leaked from the US State Department in several major newspapers. WikiLeaks had given the media outlets prior access to the diplomatic cables to publish in conjunction with their Sunday release on its site.